Donald Trump thought he could upend Iowa caucus traditions. The gamble didn’t pay off.

Hillary Clinton hoped she could wipe away her campaign nightmares of eight years ago by posting a solid win over an insurgent Bernie Sanders.

Instead, her margin of victory over Sanders was vanishingly small.

Those were just some of the surprise twists from Monday night’s results. Here’s what the numbers and results tell us about how and why they happened, according to our analysis of the entrance/exit polling and the county-by-county results.

1. Huge turnout didn’t just benefit Trump — it also helped Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

The conventional wisdom before Monday night was that a surge in new voters would benefit Trump, who was working to attract first-time caucus-goers and nonconventional voters.

Indeed, a record 186,000 Republicans caucused Monday night. But the 65,000-voter bump from four years ago didn’t translate into a Trump victory.

According to entrance polls, 45 percent of GOP voters said this was their first caucus, and of those, 30 percent voted for Trump. But an even larger chunk ended up splitting between Cruz (23 percent) and Rubio (22 percent).

Read the article “Iowa Caucus Results: 6 Things That Explain How It Happened” on npr.org.