On Tuesday morning, Burlington, Vermont, was warm enough for short sleeves. Bernie Sanders wore a suit jacket and drove his own car, a Subaru Forester, to his local polling place, a community and recreation center. His wife, Jane, rode shotgun. They walked inside the rec center and sat down to vote. “I think I’ll take a Democrat,” Sanders quipped, to no one in particular. “Why not?” Then he walked out into a media scrum. He gave an abbreviated stump speech and declined to answer a question from a reporter about “all the moderates endorsing Joe Biden,” as he headed back to the Subaru.

Outside the polling place, a number of Sanders supporters had gathered to see him on Election Day, and I spoke with a thirty-seven-year-old named Ali Dieng, who held a Sanders sign and told me that he had come to the United States thirteen years ago, from Mauritania. He’s now a city councilman. When he was campaigning for the office, in 2017, he had knocked on Sanders’s door and given him some campaign literature. “A senator!” Dieng recalled. “He greeted me at his house and asked me great, wonderful questions.” Sanders ended up endorsing him. “To me,” Dieng went on, “he’s almost like a prophet sent by God to make the world a better place.” As for the state of the Democratic primary, Dieng suggested I check out the #PeteToBernie hashtag on Twitter. A lot of people were switching candidates, he said. He was feeling confident “that Bernie is our guy to beat Trump.”

“Ali,” a middle-aged man, who was passing by, said. “Good to see you, boss.” The man introduced himself as Kevin Stapleton, and said that he was an economist. He had come with his seven-year-old daughter, to vote for Elizabeth Warren. I asked him about the more moderate candidates—Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke—consolidating around Biden. “My most important consideration is beating Trump in this election,” Stapleton said. “And the quicker we consolidate the quicker that’s going to happen.”

Later, a retired construction worker named Mark Bird ambled past, with a bagel in hand. He said he’d voted for Sanders every time Sanders was on a ballot. “My philosophy is: if you don’t vote, don’t bitch. So I bitch.” Medical care is a major concern of Bird’s. “I’ve had three seizures,” he said. “I’d like a little medical insurance.” Did he think Bernie would beat Biden, and then Trump? “Do I think he’ll win?” He thought for a moment. “I don’t know. It costs my brain to think. No thinking—I’ll just vote.”

In the evening, as the first results came in, I was at Sanders’s Super Tuesday party, in Essex Junction. Two members of the jam band Phish were playing live music. The early returns suggested that voters were consolidating their support even more quickly than many pundits had anticipated. Virginia was called for Biden as soon as the polls closed, then North Carolina was called for him, too. Vermont went for Sanders, as did Colorado. Other states, including delegate-rich Texas, were too close to call. It was still early in California, which is known for counting its many votes rather slowly.

The results were “like a bad flashback,” one Sanders supporter told me. Biden’s victories in the South—he also won Alabama, and his performance in South Carolina, on Saturday, had propelled his sudden surge—evoked Hillary Clinton’s Southern dominance four years ago, when she was the establishment favorite going up against Sanders.

“This is Phish?” Kathy Beinert said, as she sat down near me. “I’m an upper-middle-class, sixty-eight-year-old white woman who wants a revolution,” she told me. “I know my taxes are gonna go up. So will my fellow-man.” I relayed some of the early results. “It’s kind of similar to what happened before,” she said, referring to 2016. “But I think there’s more people mobilized for Bernie this time. It’s just gonna be a crap shoot.” Beinert said that she would vote Biden if it came to that. “I’m not stupid,” she said, adding, “I’m worried about the young ones.”

A group of young people in their twenties were assembled near us. A twenty-five-year-old named Brandon Hayden wore a pin bearing a picture of Ron (Pigpen) McKernan, the Grateful Dead’s first keyboardist, on his overalls. He told me he’d been following Sanders “for fucking eight years now.” “Felt pretty robbed last time,” he said, of 2016. “I’ll tell you what was quite a bummer. I voted for Hillary last time. I couldn’t bear to see the state go red. I knew there was a lot of people voting for Trump outside of my bubbles.” This time, he said, he wasn’t likely to vote for a candidate he didn’t like. “I’ll write in Bernie Sanders the rest of my life.”

When Sanders took the stage, later in the evening, to a loud ovation, he declined to refer to any of the other candidates by name. “You cannot beat Trump with the same old, same old kind of politics,” he said, presumably referring to Biden, who has campaigned, in part, on a return to normalcy. Sanders said that his campaign could inspire “the highest voter turnout in American political history,” and that he wanted to run on “a contrast in ideas.” “Another candidate,” he said, meaning Biden, “voted for the war in Iraq,” and “another candidate”—Biden, again—“voted for disastrous trade agreements.” Sanders spoke for about ten minutes, and then ended by thanking Vermont for the “years and years of love and support you have given me and my family,” and declaring, “Let’s go on to the White House.”