You say you want a revolution?

As it turns out, maybe not. 

At almost the last possible moment, the Democratic establishment coalesced behind Joe Biden, and Super Tuesday voters did the same – interrupting the energy that seemed to be powering Bernie Sanders toward the party’s presidential nomination. Now the momentum has shifted to Biden, the former vice president, who swept a half-dozen Southern states, won Minnesota and was unexpectedly close in early returns in the night’s second-biggest prize, Texas.

“They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing,” a jubilant Biden told supporters in Los Angeles. 

The Democratic race is hardly over. Sanders was declared the winner in California, the nation’s biggest single trove of delegates, where polls closed at 11 p.m. EST. (The state’s 415 delegates will be apportioned among candidates who hit 15% of the vote.) He also carried Colorado and his home state of Vermont. He has almost $17 million in the bank, the social network to raise more, and a committed core of supporters who have been with him since 2016.

That said, this contest has been transformed in the space of the week. That is courtesy of Biden’s solid victory in South Carolina on Saturday, the endorsements of two former rivals on Monday, and growing alarm that having Sanders at the top of the ticket could cost Democrats their best chance to deny Donald Trump a second term.

Strong in the South: Biden sweeps the south on Super Tuesday, building on South Carolina win

Other presidential candidates have suffered setbacks and staged comebacks to win a nomination, among them Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bill Clinton in 1992, John Kerry in 2004, John McCain in 2008. But whatever happens at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee this summer, the velocity of Biden’s turnaround has been head-spinning, and historic.

That wasn’t the result of TV ads – former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg was the one blanketing the Super Tuesday airwaves with those, to little result – and without the sort of deep field organization that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has built in key states.

What Biden did have was the sense that he was, in the end, the party’s best hope of nominating a consensus candidate who would be most likely to win back the White House and avoid losses down the ballot.

That argument finally got traction when Biden managed to win a state – after finishing a catastrophic fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary – and when rivals who were splintering the party’s moderate ranks decided to suspend their faltering campaigns and embrace his. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., did that with a speed that is unusual in a profession known more for big egos than self-sacrifice.

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Bloomberg’s failure to break through in the Super Tuesday contests, despite spending millions on ads and campaign staff, raised questions about how long his campaign would continue, too. He won only in American Samoa, where residents can’t vote in the presidential election but can send a delegation to the Democratic convention, and fell short of the 15% threshold needed to win delegates in many of the 14 states voting Tuesday. (He got one delegate in North Carolina.)

The contest’s rapidly shifting ground was apparent when voters were asked when they had settled on a candidate. About one in four voters in the NBC News exit poll said that they had decided more than a few days ago; Sanders got the lion’s share of their support. About one in five said they made their decision during the past few days; among those, close to half chose Biden, more than double the percentage who picked Sanders. 

Another illuminating finding in the survey of voters as they left polling places: Just over a third said they wanted the Democratic Party to nominate the candidate who agreed with them most on issues. But significantly more, six in 10, said they preferred the nominee who can beat Trump.

Super Tuesday test: Biden faces big test with Latino voters as he seeks to cut into Sanders’ strength

Donald Trump has unified the Republican Party and made its overriding mission to re-elect him. In a mirror image, he also has unified the Democratic Party and made its overriding mission to defeat him. 

Sanders proudly describes himself as a Democratic socialist and his movement as a revolution, a rocket ship to the future that includes Medicare-for-All, a Green New Deal and free college tuition. “You cannot defeat Trump with the same-old, same-old kind of politics,” he told cheering supporters at a Vermont victory party. Biden portrayed himself as more of a designated driver, advocating policies that were within the confines of traditional liberalism. He called for improving the Affordable Care Act, for instance, not for replacing it.

Those positions are weak tea for Sanders and his supporters, who argue that the times demand more dramatic change. But on Super Tuesday, that seemed to be exactly what voters wanted on the menu. 

Tracking Super Tuesday: The latest from every state

More: Live Super Tuesday primary election results from 14 primaries

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