Vox Sentences: The two trends that explain what happened in Iowa

Decoding the caucus results from both parties; Alphabet (formerly known as Google) topples Apple for world's most valuable company.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Ela-Ted

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

• Ted Cruz won the 2016 Iowa Republican caucus last night, confounding polling that showed him coming in second to Trump.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Trump underperformed a little, but Cruz overperformed a lot — thanks to a relatively old-school focus on field organization and turnout, and relatively new-school tactics of microtargeting. (Sasha Issenberg explains in detail.)

  [Bloomberg / Sasha Issenberg]

• Trump's concession speech was … classy. Almost … too classy.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• Meanwhile, Marco Rubio somehow also "won" despite coming in third, because he was closer to Trump than expected and the Republican establishment is desperate for a hero.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The entrance-poll finding that explains the GOP: "moderate" caucus-goers heavily favored Trump. "Somewhat conservative" ones picked Rubio. "Very conservative" ones picked Cruz.

  [CBS News]

• The GOP's biggest loser? Jeb Bush, who spent approximately $2,884 in Iowa for every vote he got there.

  [Weekly Standard / Daniel Halper]

A two-person race

Alex Wong/Getty Image

• Technically, Hillary Clinton won the Democratic caucus. But by any meaningful measure, she tied with Bernie Sanders.

  [CBS News ]

• Multiple caucuses came down to a coin toss — a fact that some Sanders supporters have overinterpreted, but which still means a lot of caucuses were easily split.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The entrance-poll finding that explains the Democrats: Young voters overwhelmingly supported Sanders. Older voters heavily supported Clinton.

  [The Atlantic / Ronald Brownstein]

• Sanders's biggest problem is that, unlike Barack Obama in 2008, the coalition he assembled in Iowa can't readily extend to victories in other states.

  [Vox / Jeff Stein]

• The Democrats' biggest loser? Martin O'Malley, who dropped out last night after never really having had a chance to talk about his (often detailed!) campaign proposals.

  [New Republic / Rebecca Leber]

Can we make "Googlebet" happen

Kimberly White/Getty Images for Fortune

• Alphabet, the company formerly known as Google, became the most valuable company in the world today, beating out Apple.

  [TechCrunch / Matthew Lynley]

• This came after Alphabet revealed yesterday that it had blown way past revenue expectations in the fourth quarter of last year.

  [CNBC / Leigh Drogran]

• The revenue call began to illustrate why Google restructured itself as Alphabet. It's looking for more flexibility in putting money into "long bets" — things like Fiber and Nest.

  [BuzzFeed News / Matt Zeitlin]

• And while it spent $3.6 billon on those long bets last year, some of them are beginning to make money back — they pulled in nearly half a billion dollars in revenue in the last quarter of 2015.

  [Fortune / Leena Rao]

• Another asset for Alphabet: Gmail, which has now hit 1 billion worldwide users.

  [The Verge / Ross Miller]

• Meanwhile, WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook, also announced that it had hit 1 billion users this week — and made the announcement during Google's revenue call, in case you're wondering whether there's a Google/Facebook rivalry.

  [WhatsApp]

MISCELLANEOUS

Ravens are intellectually capable of being paranoid. [AFP]

• Ketamine is one of the most promising treatments in decades for severe depression, and the psychiatry profession is finally getting on board.

  [Washington Post / Sara Solovitch]

• Drones are old news. The hot new gadget this spring is the cyborg cockroach.

  [Ars Technica / Cassandra Khaw]

• Since 2014, there have been 49 reported fatalities from selfies. Seventy-five percent of victims were male, their average age was 21, and nearly 40 percent happened in India.

  [Priceonomics / Zachary Crockett]

• Defense Secretary Ashton Carter says the US has to prepare for "a return to great-power conflict," in case you weren't terrified enough about the future of the planet.

  [The Guardian / Spencer Ackerman]

VERBATIM

"The Army had decided that Odwalla’s juice wasn’t fit for human consumption, and Odwalla knew this, and yet kept selling it anyway." [Bill Marler to Washington Post / Roberto Ferdman]

• "You have a wonderful opportunity here to not care about something that doesn’t matter to you. Please don’t miss out on it."

  [Slate / Mallory Ortberg]

• "A few weeks into sixth grade, Colman Chadam had to leave school because of his DNA."

  [Wired / Sarah Zhang]

• "'To us, Winona Ryder is a bona fide icon,' designer Marcus Wainwright said. 'She also has this beautiful timeless quality.' But it’s actually her timeliness that gives her value—she is a human incarnation of '90s nostalgia."

  [Hazlitt / Soraya Roberts]

• "She is a tech bro — except she’s a woman, trying to sell underwear. Or, as she sees it, innovating in the 'period space.'"

  [NY Mag / Noreen Malone]

WATCH THIS

The Zika virus, explained [YouTube / Julia Belluz, Sarah Turbin, Gina Barton, Carlos Waters, Joss Fong, Javier Zarracina]

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