It's genuinely a hard thing to get your head around if you're used to covering elections through the prism of median-voter theory and liberalism. It took me several years of covering African elections to "get it" and afterwards I felt like I'd discovered some wild new way of thinking

Certainly I remember covering elections in Tanzania and Uganda in 2015 and thinking "huh, the opposition seems like they're well organised and have popular ideas", and not taking in that it didn't matter at all