Donald Trump has yet to win an outright majority in a primary or caucus – though he's getting closer, pulling in 46 percent of the vote in Nevada. But he's winning massive numbers of votes.

Mitt Romney won Nevada's caucus in 2012 with about 50 percent of the vote. He did so by pulling in roughly 16,000 total votes – roughly the same number that second-place finisher Marco Rubio pulled in this year. Donald Trump, by contrast, more than doubled Romney's total, garnering 34,500 votes.

That pattern has played out across all of the early states, which are seeing huge Trump-inspired (and, at some level, anti-Trump-inspired) turnout.

All told, Trump has now won approximately 420,000 votes. After the first four states had voted in 2012, Mitt Romney had won about 311,000 votes. Back in 2008, meanwhile, eventual nominee John McCain had won a little more than 250,000 votes after Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada had voted.

Before the primaries got underway in earnest, many assumed that Trump would fare more poorly than his poll numbers indicated because so many of his supporters had rarely voted in the past. But with this election, the past has not been a reliable predictor of future events.