In the South Carolina Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton bested Bernie Sanders in nearly every demographic group. Photograph courtesy Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

When the polls closed in South Carolina on Saturday evening, Bernie Sanders was more than a thousand miles away, flying from Dallas to Minnesota. Before he got on the plane, he called Hillary Clinton and congratulated her on her upcoming victory.

It had been clear for about a week that the Sanders campaign had given up hope of winning the Palmetto State: his travel schedule revealed as much. But Clinton’s margin of victory, when it became apparent, was still stunning. According to most of* *the opinion polls that had been taken in the previous couple of weeks, Clinton was running about thirty points ahead of Sanders. When the real votes were counted, she had received 73.5 per cent of the Democratic vote, compared to twenty-six per cent for Sanders—a margin of almost fifty points. Among black voters, who made up a majority of the electorate, exit polls revealed that she had defeated Sanders by the crushing margin of eighty-four per cent to fifteen per cent.

Eight years ago, Clinton lost South Carolina to Barack Obama by twenty-seven points, which is one reason why this is perhaps the biggest political triumph of her career—bigger even than her comeback victory in New Hampshire during the 2008 campaign. That win put her back in the Presidential race; this one put her back on course to win the Democratic nomination. When she gave her victory speech in Columbia, she already appeared to be looking ahead to a general election against Donald Trump. “Despite what you hear, we don’t need to make America great again,” Clinton said. “America never stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again.”

Of course, only four Democratic votes have been held, and the vast majority of delegates are still up for grabs. As soon as the networks called the race for Clinton on Saturday night, the Sanders campaign put out a statement that read “This campaign is just beginning.” Later in the evening, after landing in Minnesota, Sanders backed up that message, saying, “On Tuesday, more than eight hundred delegates are at stake, and we intend to win many of them.”

But the sheer scale of Clinton’s victory in South Carolina suggests that Sanders is now facing a monumental task. Almost certainly, she will sweep six of the seven Southern states that are set to vote in the so-called “S.E.C. primary,” on Tuesday: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia. She may also win Oklahoma, where Sanders has been campaigning hard. And there are also questions about whether Sanders will be able to carry states he has targeted further north, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota.

As he has done elsewhere, in South Carolina Sanders did much better among white voters than among minority voters. But he didn’t win that population segment either. According to the exit polls, Clinton got fifty-four per cent of the white vote, and Sanders got forty-eight per cent. If Clinton can replicate elsewhere this pattern of splitting the white vote and doing extremely well with minority voters, she will eventually get all of the delegates she needs to earn the nomination.

In terms of strategy, the South Carolina result was a vindication of Clinton’s decision to concentrate on core Democratic voters, and to try and re-create the Obama coalition that swept the Democrats to victory in 2008 and 2012. A key part of that coalition, obviously, is black voters. Even before she had made her candidacy official, Clinton was cultivating black leaders, visiting black churches, and embracing issues that matter to black voters, such as the police shooting of black youths and the Black Lives Matter movement. In her victory speech, Clinton saluted five mothers—including the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner—who had accompanied her around South Carolina in recent days. She also appeared to invoke Obama’s legacy, saying, “When we stand together there is no barrier too big to break.”

According to the exit polls, sixty-one per cent of the people who voted in Saturday’s primary were black, compared to fifty-five per cent in 2008. The Sanders campaign, which had scores of representatives in South Carolina, did manage to pick up some black voters: early in the campaign, opinion polls showed him with five per cent or less of the black vote. But endorsements of Sanders by black celebrities such as Danny Glover and Spike Lee were no match for Clinton’s name recognition and popularity in the black community, or for the backing she received from local Democratic politicians, such as Congressman James Clyburn, the top-ranking African-American in the House of Representatives, who introduced her to the cheering crowd on Saturday night.

Black churches and pastors, one of whom Clinton cited in her speech, were also part of the story. According to the exit polls, fifty-seven per cent of the South Carolina voters attend church weekly. Evidently, not many of them warmed up to Sanders, at least not sufficiently to abandon Clinton for a left-wing insurgent from Vermont. Despite the fact that South Carolina is a poor state, and particularly so in areas where black people tend to live, his message didn’t resonate as much there as it has elsewhere. Just twenty per cent of the voters said that inequality was the most important issue to them, versus forty-three per cent who said that the economy and jobs were.

In other parts of the country with higher concentrations of white and secular voters, Sanders will no doubt perform far better. For an avowedly left-wing candidate who didn’t even formally join the Democratic Party until a year or two ago, he has already done fabulously well. In South Carolina, he once again won a majority of young voters, defeating Clinton by fifty-four per cent to forty-six per cent in the seventeen-to-twenty-nine age group.

But that was about the only demographic in which Sanders came out ahead. Clinton won among all other age groups, both sexes, and all income and education groups. Having entered the Democratic race as the anointed candidate, only to struggle in Iowa, get embarrassed in New Hampshire, and win narrowly in Nevada, she needed a solid victory before Super Tuesday. The one she got was bigger and more overwhelming than even she could have expected. “Tomorrow, this campaign goes national,” she said. As it does, Clinton will have regained her aura of inevitability.