Moussavi's followers' sense of grievance means that they're unlikely to be reconciled, even if it turns out that Ahmadinejad won. Assembling the evidence is still useful for those not so directly involved. 

The two key lines of evidence for an Ahmadinjead win are these: he led in the polling, and he was popular in all the rural parts of Iran, and with the urban poor. The second argument is put particularly directly on conversations with Grandma.  The best, or at least most independent, evidence I've seen for the first is Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty's Washington Post piece: they show that Ahmadinejad was polling well -- he had a 2:1 advantage over Moussavi -- though only 34% of respondents had decided for him.

Taking the second first, there have now been two separate persuasive responses to the findings of the poll, here and here. Juan Cole's guest poster, Mansour Moaddel, is persusasive when he argues that the unusually high share of those who declined to answer the poll question means their result is unreliable, and he's explains why the post-poll debates could have swung the election for Moussavi. Inferring an Ahmadinejad win from the poll is complicated by the fact that it also predicts electoral intimidation in favour of Ahmadinejad.

The first argument is also tricky. In 2005, Ahmadinejad was actually stronger in the cities: he tended to do better in urban than in rural Iran. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has the numbers. Further, 70% of Iran's population is now urbanised: if Ahmadinejad was going to win, he needed a much larger coalition than was available in rural Iran. In fact, there's also evidence that Ahmadinejad was less popular in rural Iran in 2009 than he was in 2005: this piece by Eric Hooglund reports from a village in southwestern Iran where there was massive support for Moussavi. It was thought that Ahmadinejad had the support of rural voters as well as the urban poor because he had spent serious money on social provision. Interestingly, Hooglund finds that Ahmadinejad voters tend to be direct employees of the state. That suggests that Ahmadinejad's social spending probably went directly to state employees, and those connected with them, rather than the larger rural constituency that Ahmadinejad needed to win. These bits of evidence suggest, even without taking into account ethnic variations, that rural Iran is not quite as solid a bloc for Ahmadinejad as it seems.

Neither, probably, are poor urban Iranians. Except for 2006, year-on-year inflation has risen nearly every year since Ahamdinejad was first elected in 2005. There are few things as annoying for poor urbanites as inflation -- remember that one of ODM's more effective tactics in 2007 was to show how quickly prices had risen since 2002. There were signs as early as 2007 that Ahmadinejad's program of redistribution to the poor was in trouble (see the New Internationalist). And if you look at this post on Prof. Isfahanis' blog, you'll see some truly Kenyan-esque youth unemployment figures: even going by the official figures, he reckons that 20% of men - and 40% of women - under 30 are unemployed. Bear in mind, too, that Iran in 2006 had a world-record 35% proportion of its population between 15 and 29. Ahmadinejad's winning coalition is supposed to be rural voters and poor urbanites. Rising inflation, horrible unemployment, an unusually-large proportion of unemployed youth, very partial delivery of his 2005 election promises and a large urban vote: it's sensible to assume that even if Ahmadinejad's coalition came through, it wouldn't have been by a very large margin.

The best explanation for an Ahmadinejad victory with the margin claimed for him by Iran's interior ministry is that he won very large majorities in rural Iran, and significant chunks of the cities. Taken with this expert's recent finding of 'moderately strong evidence of fraud', the evidence makes that explanation hard to sustain.

(Ahmadinejad actually grew the economy, and even did some redistribution, but the redistribution was badly done, favoured state employees, and seriously worsened inflation (and probably corruption). So, there was visible growth, combined with high and probably increasing youth unemployment, in a country that had quite a lot of young people. An explosive mix, as Kenya found out, and probably the reason for the intensity of the protests in Iran. The other comparative point is that the Iranian protesters are much better behaved than us Kenyans.)

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