In South Carolina’s evangelical-dominated Republican primary on Saturday, Donald Trump won 33 percent of the evangelical vote. In Tuesday’s Nevada primary, Trump upped the ante, claiming 40 percent of evangelical votes. And while it was jarring in both cases to see a Biblically illiterate, divorced billionaire win over such a sizable portion of America’s conservative faithful, an equally curious phenomenon has unfolded in the shadows of Trump’s victories: evangelical voters’ relative ambivalence toward Ted Cruz.

From the outset of the race, the senator from Texas has positioned himself as an evangelical-friendly candidate, emphasizing his religious upbringing (vis-a-vis his pastor father Rafael Cruz) and rolling out the harsh rhetoric on classic culture-war issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. Cruz’s push for evangelical votes was more than a perfunctory shout-out to an important Republican base: Inspiring vast, energetic evangelical support was a key strategy for the Cruz campaign, despite other Republican analysts’ misgivings. As Robert Draper reported in The New York Times, Cruz advisers estimated that “10 million [evangelical] voters who did not vote in the 2000 election turned out for Bush in 2004 and have stayed home since.” They hoped to stir these missing evangelicals to pull out a Cruz victory, although others, including former George W. Bush advisers, suspected the 10 million number was wildly inflated.

But if the Cruz campaign was still hoping, up until last night, that evangelicals would emerge en masse behind him, they’re now likely rethinking their game plans. While polling did reveal higher-than-usual evangelical turnout in Nevada, those voters hardly united behind Cruz, who finished both third overall and third among evangelicals, taking only 23 percent of the evangelical vote to Trump’s 40 and Marco Rubio’s 26.

Numbers like those would spell disaster for Cruz in next week’s Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses. All along, Cruz has hinged his hopes for the nomination in no small part on riding the evangelical vote to a sweep of the Southern states—six of which, including his home state of Texas, vote on March 1. But with Trump’s recent victories and little evidence of evangelical momentum on the rise behind Cruz, that pathway to the nomination no longer looks promising.

What explains Cruz’s lack of traction among evangelicals?According to Lydia Bean, author of The Politics of Evangelical Identity, the campaign’s first mistake was imagining evangelicals as a unified bloc during primary season. “I don’t think it’s particularly unusual or significant that evangelicals aren’t uniting,” Bean says. “I think what this shows is that evangelicals are fractured in general.” Bean points out that evangelicals differ not only in their politics—with some identifying as more conservative and others as more moderate—but in their religiosity.