” I’m above the floor, ” Joe Biden said in Los Angeles the morning of Super Tuesday. The Democratic presidential campaigner gripped a styrofoam beaker of ice cream in his left hand, the city’s mayor appear over his shoulder, a gather of neighbourhoods pressing in around him. “You’ve not yet interred me yet, ” he supplemented with a crooked grin. “I’m not dead.”

Far from it. On the biggest day of voting in the 2020 Democratic primary, Biden’s presidential hopes came hooting back to life. The March 3 elections held in 14 states and American Samoa capped a whirlwind few eras that reordered the Democratic primary, propelling Biden back into allegation and potentially ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders in the representative tally, depending on the full results of primaries in California and Texas, the two biggest pillages of the nighttime.

The result determineds up a pitched battle for the party’s nomination between two starkly different candidates and dreams for the future: a controversy between Biden, a onetime Vice President with wide support among moderates, African Americans and Democratic officials, and Sanders, an independent democratic socialist with a grassroots legion that has diversified this election cycle to encompass growing numbers of Latinos. Depending on the results from Super Tuesday and the delegate-rich primaries over the next two weeks, the pair could be forced to slug it out all the way to the party’s convention in Milwaukee in July. Biden’s allies, however, hoped that his force has now become unstoppable and Sanders would continue to fade.

It was a prospect that seldom seemed probable even a week ago, after Sanders won the most elects in the first 3 contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, motivating some eyewitness to testify him the prohibitive front-runner. But after a harsh start, Biden’s resounding win in the Feb. 29 South Carolina primary set off a rapid chain of events–the was withdrawn by two top challengers, who threw their reinforcement behind him, and a raft of other key endorsements–that cemented him as the Democratic establishment’s pick to take on Sanders.

The results on Super Tuesday ratified his surge. As of late in the evening, the onetime Vice President had acquired Alabama, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia. Many of his success appears to be by enormous margins, enabling him to sweep up gigantic swaths of designates, which are allocated proportionally to campaigners that receive at least 15% of the vote.

Sanders was projected to triumph California, Colorado and Utah in addition to his home state of Vermont. Texas was too close to call with about 60% of districts reporting, and Sanders and Biden were also locked in a close-fisted combat in Maine.

“They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing! ” Biden revelled as he mobilized backers in Los Angeles Tuesday evening, flanked by his wife and sister, whom he momentarily confused with one another. “People are talking about a revolution? We started a shift! ”

Two more major candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Mike Bloomberg, struggled to pick up delegates, strangling their the expectations of a resurgence and creating questions about whether they would remain in the hasten. Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor, had spent more than half a billion dollars building a big, Super Tuesday-focused safarus functioning, but purposed up earning simply the territory of American Samoa–good for four delegates. And while Warren had professed to be in it for the long haul, she couldn’t even manage to win her home nation of Massachusetts, where she appeared on track to finish third.

“Was this not exactly what I told you was going to happen? ” a senior Biden campaign official joked. But nearly as stunning as the acceleration of Biden’s turnaround, from left for dead to back on top, was the fact that it didn’t seem to be the result of anything the candidate himself did. Instead, the party comes down to him.

Biden made some changes to his campaign after his fourth-place showing in Iowa on Feb. 3, merely to fare even worse in the next game, coming in fifth in the Feb. 11 New Hampshire primary. He came in second in the Feb. 22 Nevada caucuses but deserved really 20% of the voting rights and 9 designates there.

Biden’s debate operations continued to be decent but uneven, and his expedition was in danger of running out of money. He couldn’t afford to sit major promote buys, construct out a field tournament or even poll the Super Tuesday territory. But he obtained from happenings outside his ascendancy. Bloomberg’s poor debate actions intimidated moderates still looking forward to a deus ex machina. And Sanders’s early successes frightened rank-and-file Democrat looking for a nominee that is able to steer toward the center in November.

All the while, Biden kept insisting that the largely African American electorate of South Carolina would stick with him. And in the end, with an expedite from the endorsement of influential South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, they did. Biden’s practically 30 -point South Carolina victory opened the floodgates. He elevated $15 million in three days and determined his two main challengers, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, drop by the wayside and endorse him, together with a procession of Democratic Party elders and elected officials.

Exit ballots indicated that Biden’s strongest voter demographics, African Americans and older Democrat, provided the basi for his wins, bolstered by a late-breaking surge of acquainted suburban moderates. An uncommon ratio of the electorate, more than 40%, told pollsters they formed their decision of how to vote in the last few days, an indication of the uncertainty and angst that have commemorated this primary as Democrats grapple with the existential question of how best to take on President Trump in November.

Sanders worked hard to expand the passionate change he began to build in 2016, contacting out to minority voters and performing his own electability lurch are stationed in vast side on his strong among young voters. But turnout to date has not patronized his contention that he can enormously expand the electorate, and voters in most of the Super Tuesday states seen unconvinced. Exit polls demonstrated voters prioritizing potential candidates they made could win over one who agreed with their views by a 2-to-1 margin.

Votes were still being counted in California, the most prominent Super Tuesday booty in matters of delegates, where Sanders hoped to run up the score. “I tell you with absolute confidence, ” he told a cheering crowd in his hometown of Burlington, “we are going to win the Democratic nomination.” He proceeded to draw a sharp distinguish between his record and Biden’s, pointing out their disparate standings on the Iraq war, right sections, “disastrous trade agreements” and consumer protection.

Sanders’s grassroots fundraising remains unparalleled: the campaign announced it had raised $ 46.5 million in February from more than 2.2 million subscriptions. His backers bickered he would benefit going forward from a one-on-on contrast with Biden, which “theyre saying” would decorate the policy differences between the two men. “What we have is a two-person race, ” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Sanders supporter, said on MSNBC.

Sanders’s strong locate and delegate haul still yields him a shot to acquire the nomination. But Tuesday differentiated a dramatic alter in force. “Basically the entire month of February was a perfect storm for Bernie Sanders, ” says Addisu Demissie, a California-based strategist who finagled information campaigns of Sen. Cory Booker. “And then the first three days of March were a perfect storm for Joe Biden and been in a position to turned all of that. It’s hard to believe how much has changed.”

With reporting by Alana Abramson and Philip Elliott/ Washington, Charlotte Alter/ Los Angeles, Katy Steinmetz/ Oakland and Lissandra Villa/ Houston.

Read more: time.com