East High School in Denver, Colorado, home to 14 precincts for the Democratic caucuses, was a mob scene on Tuesday night. It was hard to judge the turnout, but one of the organisers said there were about 5,000 people there, and I believed him: rooms designated for caucusing were overflowing, and several precincts gave up and held their votes in the stairwell or outside the building.

This shows how special this election is — and how obsolete the American two-party system has become. Throughout the Super Tuesday states, vote organisers reported record or near-record turnouts fuelled by several campaigns that are really revolutions, or counter-revolutions, in the making. The people who support them aren’t giving up easily. If Super Tuesday was supposed to be about winnowing, it’s not happening just yet.

By the numbers, Hillary Clinton did well enough to start concentrating on the general election and Donald Trump did well enough for Clinton to start strategising about beating him. That, however, would be too simplistic a story.

At East High, the enormous crowd was made up mostly of first-time caucusgoers, as demonstrated by a show of hands in the school’s parking lot before the chaos was organised haphazardly into precincts. One precinct after another voted overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders, his supporters cheering loudly when the counts were announced. Sanders won Colorado, Oklahoma, Minnesota and his home state of Vermont, and he was just behind Clinton in Massachusetts. There’s no reason for him to drop out of the race.

Clinton has ended up with many more delegates, and the people spoken to at East High said somewhat reluctantly that they would probably back Clinton in the general election if Sanders is not on the ballot. But it’s clear that this demographically and ideologically distinct group of people is not going to melt into the Democratic Party as we knew it. These people are going to be disappointed if Clinton settles for minimal change and doesn’t push any of the ambitious socialist plans that Sanders has espoused. In four years’ time, Sanders probably will not be back as a candidate, but his people will be back as voters and Clinton needs to think about engaging them before they turn into more active opponents.

On the Republican side, there’s no need for anyone, except perhaps Ben Carson, to drop out. Marco Rubio recorded his first win, in Minnesota, his only state.

There was talk — backed up by some polling data — of Ted Cruz losing narrowly or tying Trump in his home state of Texas, but Cruz coasted to victory there and also claimed Oklahoma, where a Trump win had been predicted. John Kasich ended up almost even with Trump in Vermont, and he hasn’t scored any victories, but he’s not leaving the race at least until his home state of Ohio votes on March 15.

The reason every candidate, Republican and Democratic, still has something to look forward to is that the six people still seriously in the race — not counting Carson — all represent distinct platforms that cannot really be squeezed into two parties. The rules push them towards consolidation, but they are too far apart ideologically and their voter bases are too distinct.

This is a centrifugal election. The elemental democratic forces at work in it defy the pull towards the selection of clear leaders. To use the US topology, which might be misleading to Europeans because the entire American political spectrum is far to the right of what they’re used to, Clinton’s left-of-centre party is distinct from Sanders’s far Left one. Trump’s nativist-populist political force has little in common with Cruz’s ultraconservative Christian one, Rubio’s hard Right secular party or Kasich’s right-of-centre one. The emerging multiparty reality is what’s driving the record turnouts in almost every state this year. The people who are taking part in this early stage of the political process for the first time in their lives are not excited about the candidates themselves — Trump supporters, focused on his flamboyant personality, are an exception; they are excited about the ideas that set the candidates apart.

The Republican cage fight, with insults flying and debates turning into shouting matches, overshadows the real-life divisions in the grass-roots party. The Democrats, who have avoided the mudslinging, will reluctantly close ranks around Clinton, but their differences are pronounced as well.

I have heard many times from the smartest people I’ve talked to while covering the primaries that the two-party system is here to stay. Years of observing the process shaped in the past two centuries create a bias towards the status quo. Yet the growing number of voters who do not align with the major parties is nothing to sneeze at. It will lead to the emergence of more nationally competitive parties than two and to a greater number of viable candidates on the presidential ballot.

It will take courage to begin dismantling the system, but it already appears to be imploding. That the leading candidates are also the two with the highest negative ratings — Clinton and Trump — is just one sign of this: when a system no longer reflects the democratic impulses it is supposed to amplify, the outcome can only be suboptimal.

• Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer