These are the three big questions we should all be asking after Super Tuesday

Bernie Sanders’ moment in the political sun lasted just long enough to unnerve establishment Democrats.

Faced with Sanders’ unexpectedly strong performance in a slew of early states, centrist players including former South Bend mayor, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and even former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke lined up to endorse Sanders’ moderate opponent, former vice president Joe Biden. With votes still being counted in delegate-rich states like California, it looks like Biden’s endorsement power play paid off.

Biden’s dominant performance in 10 of 14 states on Super Tuesday not only vaults his campaign ahead of Sanders in the popular vote — a crucial metric Sanders has used to argue that his campaign enjoys broad support among American voters — but also puts Biden ahead in the critical race for Democratic delegates. Biden also strongly outperformed Sanders among African American voters, a core Democratic constituency unshakably committed to Biden.

From convention walkouts to the stunning collapse of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential prospects, here are the three key takeaways from Super Tuesday, and how they stand to influence the rest of the Democratic campaign to oust president Donald Trump this November:

For the past month, Democratic insiders have fretted over a cataclysmic scenario: what if neither Biden nor Sanders wins the 1,991 delegates necessary to become the Democratic nominee on the first convention ballot?

Fears that the Democratic Convention could proceed to multiple ballots — including the addition of about 770 “superdelegates” after the first ballot — have pundits quaking. That situation becomes even worse if Sanders enters the Democratic convention with the most overall delegates, only to lose the nomination to Biden on a second (or third, or fourth) ballot.

Biden’s raft of recent endorsements and his strong Super Tuesday results are likely to calm Beltway doomsayers. That Biden snatched the symbolic popular vote lead from Sanders adds one more feather to the establishment’s cap.

One name barely came up during the media feeding frenzy around Super Tuesday: Massachusetts senator Warren. Once a top-tier presidential contender, Warren’s painful Super Tuesday showing effectively guarantees her departure from the race.

On a night when Biden secured over 350 delegates to Sanders’ 280, Warren squeaked by with only about 28 — only slightly better than also-ran billionaire candidate Mike Bloomberg. More devastating for her campaign was a third-place finish in her home state of Massachusetts, where Biden pulled off a surprising upset victory over Sanders.

Warren’s campaign likely faced the same depressing delegate math as the recently shuttered Buttigieg and Klobuchar campaigns. Her decision to stay in the race through Super Tuesday is already drawing fire from Sanders supporters, who now accuse Warren of splitting the progressive vote to deny Sanders additional victories. Whether or not that was Warren’s strategy — it almost certainly was not — it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing much more from her as a serious candidate for president.

After an embarrassing experiment in running for president that saw New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg incinerate over $600 million of his personal fortune to gain only a dozen delegates, Bloomberg announced Wednesday that he’d had enough. In an email to campaign staff, Bloomberg withdrew from the Democratic race and threw his support behind Biden.

Bloomberg stands to make more of an impact as a big-money funder of Democratic candidates than he did as a candidate for president. He has committed to spending potentially over a billion dollars to ensure a Democratic victory over Donald Trump in November. Bloomberg’s billions now look like they will serve the dual purpose of blunting Sanders at every turn.

With Bloomberg adding his considerable wallet to the campaign to stop Sanders, it remains unclear how the Sanders campaign expects to neutralize establishment opposition without splitting the Democratic Party in two. Democratic insiders fear a divided party could hand yet another winnable election to Trump, while fostering rifts in the party that live on long past the 2020 cycle.

How Sanders handles criticism and party opposition will define the course of the Democratic Party heading into November. Sanders still controls a veritable army of diehard supporters — many of whom sat out the 2016 election that brought Trump to power. The message Sanders sends to those voters will determine whether 2020 goes down in history as triumph or tragedy for Democrats across the country.