After Saturday’s caucuses and primaries in Kansas and a few other states, major national news organizations had almost instantaneous analysis, some of which was pretty good.

On the Republican side, Sen. Ted Cruz, who won Kansas by more than a two-to-one margin, clearly emerged as a credible threat to Donald Trump, although it’s too soon to completely write off Marco Rubio. John Kasich, on the other hand, might want to think about angling to be somebody’s vice president.

And for Democrats, the conventional wisdom seems to be that nothing Bernie Sanders does will ever be good enough. Despite his wins in small, predominantly white states like Kansas and Nebraska (and his home state of Vermont), Hillary Clinton showed in Louisiana that she is still a dominant force in large states with substantial minority populations. And that will count for a lot down the road in places like New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California.

Closer to home, though, I’ve been sifting through the vote totals and recalling the dozens of conversations I’ve had with voters in both parties’ caucuses in Douglas County, and here are my top five takeaways from the process:

Related story: Sanders, Cruz win Kansas caucuses; Douglas County voters turn out in droves

1. Kansas caucus-goers are not very moderate

It’s often said that primary elections bring out only the most passionate and motivated of voters, which results in the election of officeholders who are more extreme than the people they represent. Caucuses, even more so.

Well, Kansas just proved that in spades by picking the single most conservative Republican in the field, and probably the single most liberal Democrat to come along since Eugene McCarthy.

That’s nothing new for Kansas Republicans, whose last two picks were Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008.

Kansas Democrats, though, have done this only once before, in 2008, when they backed Barack Obama by wide margins. Obama was unchallenged for renomination in 2012.

It’s important to remember that high-turnout, competitive caucus races in Kansas are a relatively new thing. Before 2008, both parties here, and especially the Democrats, were content to stay out of the fray and let party leaders choose delegates themselves, and those leaders would often wait until the national race was already decided. Looking back beyond that:

1992, the last Kansas presidential primary, Kansas Democrats went for Bill Clinton; the sitting president at the time, George H.W. Bush, was unopposed for renomination.

1996, Clinton was unopposed for renomination; Kansas Republicans lined up with native son Bob Dole.

2000, Democratic caucuses went for then-Vice President Al Gore, who was virtually unopposed; Republicans chose delegates by state convention and backed George W. Bush.

2004, John Kerry, who was already the clear front-runner, won the Kansas caucuses; incumbent President George W. Bush was unopposed.

2. East and west are very different

For Democrats, voter turnout was highest in the eastern half of the state, where Sanders racked up his biggest numbers. In the 2nd District, which includes Lawrence, Sanders gathered more than 8,000 votes, or 72 percent of the total. He got slightly fewer (7,671) in the 3rd District around Kansas City. In the Big 1st District of western Kansas, he got only 4,074, which was still 69 percent of the total, indicating just how few Democratic voters there are out there. The Wichita-centered 4th District gave him 6,588, or 71 percent of the total.

On the Republican side, Cruz did best in the 4th District, the only district where he won an outright majority, 58 percent. But that came from 7,963 ballots, fewer votes than Sanders got in the 2nd and 3rd Districts. Elsewhere, Cruz received only a plurality of votes: 49 percent in the 1st District; 46 percent in the 2nd District; and 38 percent in the 3rd District.

Out west, Republican caucus-goers outnumbered Democratic voters by more than four to one: 24,061 to 5,907. Not so in the 2nd and 3rd Districts, however, where the numbers were quite a bit closer to each other, although GOP voters still outnumbered Democratic voters by substantial margins. But wait until the end of this post before reading too much into that.

3. Endorsements don’t matter as much as grassroots organizing

Marco Rubio barnstormed Kansas the day before the caucus, carrying a list of endorsements from elected Republican officials as long as your arm, including Gov. Sam Brownback and U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts. He finished a distant third, with only 17 percent of the vote.

Likewise, Hillary Clinton had endorsements from many notable Kansas Democrats, including former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and former state party chairwoman Joan Wagnon. She finished with only 32 percent of the vote.

What Sanders and Cruz both had, stretching back months before the caucuses, were grassroots organizations working on their behalf.

Anybody who had driven around Lawrence counting yard signs, bumper stickers and lapel buttons should have seen from a mile away that Sanders had the bigger base of support here. The only question was whether the millennial generation voters would actually turn out for caucuses the same way 18- to 24-year-old voters did eight years ago for Obama. They did.

Similarly, Cruz had been building county and local-level ground organizations for months leading up to the caucuses. And having a guy like Rep. Mark Kahrs, of Wichita, a locally popular evangelical Christian conservative, as his state coordinator had to have helped Cruz in the 4th District, just as it helped Kahrs get elected GOP National Committeeman from Kansas.

4. It helps, some, to campaign here

It shouldn’t escape notice that Sanders campaigned here twice, albeit once a couple of miles on the other side of the state line. Still, a lot of Sanders supporters from as far away as Lawrence and Topeka made their way into Kansas City, Mo., for his first appearance. And his rally in Lawrence the Thursday before the caucuses was a big success for him. Sanders was also all over the airwaves in Kansas in the week leading up to the caucuses, and he had fliers stuffing mail boxes of Democratic and unaffiliated voters all over the state.

Clinton, by contrast, had field organizers working in several parts of the state. But she never appeared here, and her advertising campaign was all but nonexistent.

Oddly, none of the Republican candidates did much radio or TV advertising either, but the top three at least made personal appearances. In addition to Rubio’s three-city tour on Friday, Cruz made a couple of stops, including one Wednesday in Overland Park and another Saturday morning in Wichita.

Trump’s one and only appearance in the state, on Saturday morning in Wichita, had the appearance of something his campaign put together on the fly, either because internal polling started showing him in trouble here, or he just wanted an excuse to back out of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., which wasn’t going to be a friendly audience.

5. Caucuses are bad

The final lesson from the 2016 Kansas caucuses, and here I’m going to express personal bias: Caucuses are a lousy way of doing business.

It’s easy to see how parties and candidates like them. Not only do they bring people together in one place and get them to interact with one another, they’re a very handy tool with which to harvest names, email addresses and cellphone numbers from your most ardent voters.

From the voters’ perspective, though, they can be quite inconvenient, if not downright frustrating. I was a bit surprised by the number of Republican voters at Southwest Middle School who openly expressed utter frustration at the whole process: the amount of time they spent listening to speeches; the long lines of people waiting just to get checked in. And all that on a Saturday, when busy people with busy lives have a multitude of other chores to do as well.

But that was nothing compared to the ordeal Democrats went through. At Liberty Memorial Central Middle School, the line to get inside the building and get checked in stretched out the door and around the block on both sides. By 3 p.m., when people were supposed to be in place already, there were still scores of people in line waiting to get in.

And inside the building it was even worse, with hundreds upon hundreds of people packed into both gymnasiums, with no air-conditioning or ventilation running, where they sat — or in most cases, stood — for hours waiting to be counted. There were so many people there that hundreds more had to park themselves outside on the school’s track and field area waiting to be counted.

Fortunately, it was a lovely day, so the people outside were generally having a good time. But imagine if it had been raining, or even snowing.

Officials from both parties said they chose to hold caucuses on Saturday to make it as easy as possible for people to participate. But any convenience that came with a Saturday date, coupled with the nice weather, was easily offset by the arduous procedures the parties put in place.

According to vote tallies from the two parties, 112,159 Kansans took part in the Republican and Democratic caucuses. There are more than 1.7 million registered voters in Kansas. That’s a participation rate of roughly 6 percent.