In the previous chapters, I showed that Egyptians voted for Islamists not primarily because they wanted the application of God's law, but because they saw Islamists as champions of the redistributive policies that the majority of them crave. The reason that citizens attributed such policy commitments to Islamists rather than to leftist parties lies in the ability of Islamists to make their case to voters through religious social networks within which large numbers of Egyptians are embedded. In this chapter, I offer additional evidence for this proposition. Specifically, I argue that two facts of recent Egyptian political life are consistent with the story offered here. The first is the constriction of the Islamist vote base after their initial victory in the 2011 parliamentary elections. The second is the strong performance of non-Islamist candidates in pockets of the country where they were able to draw on local solidarities that could provide them channels to voters that matched those available to Islamists.

This chapter proceeds as follows. First I trace the eighteen months after the Muslim Brotherhood's victory in the 2011 parliamentary elections to demonstrate the speedy defection of large numbers of Egyptians from the Islamist camp, a fact that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that Islamist victories represent a popular desire for the rule of Islamic law. By the time of Mohamed Morsi's election in June 2012, it was clear that political Islam's long run of dominance had nearly run its course. The informational advantage that Islamists enjoyed in the opening moments of Egypt’s new democratic era had withered rapidly as the Brotherhood and its partners racked up a record in the legislature that voters could assess (and rail against). The chapter then offers a subnational analysis of results in Egypt's 2012 presidential elections, demonstrating that Islamist candidates were particularly vulnerable in locales where opposing candidates could tap into alternative, nonreligious social networks. The people in these locales were no less pious than their Islamist-voting counterparts, no less embedded in Islamic networks and institutions, but they could vote for non-Islamist candidates because they had means of learning about those candidates directly.