Joe Biden’s victories on Super Tuesday suggest that many voters are thinking and acting much like they did in the previous midterm elections, when Democrats—thanks to historically high turnout—flipped 41 congressional districts and regained control of the House. Many Democrats say that this is how Biden wins more delegates tonight, and how the party wins in November: through a campaign to enact a more modest agenda and provide a check on Donald Trump—not one that relies on turning out the most progressive voters in the country.

Six in 10 voters on Super Tuesday said they care more about nominating a Democrat who can defeat Trump than about anything else, according to exit polling from NBC News. Those same voters favored Biden over Bernie Sanders by 11 percent. “I’ve not seen that sense of pragmatism before” the 2018 midterms, says Steve Israel, a former congressman from New York and the former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. For Democrats right now, “it’s about one thing: winning.”…

Democrats’ pivotal wins in 2018 were in places such as Virginia’s Seventh and Tenth Congressional Districts, where Abigail Spanberger and Jennifer Wexton, respectively, defeated Republican incumbents and helped secure the Democrats’ House takeover. Last week, in addition to his overwhelming support among black voters in states such as Alabama, Biden won in these exact districts—and similar ones across the country—when he crushed Sanders in 10 of 14 state primaries. Turnout in Virginia, where the former vice president won by 30 points, increased dramatically from 2016, and Biden defeated Sanders with high margins in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.