This article suggests that Iran has an urban-rural divide like ours, and that Ahmedinajab may have won on the strength of the rural districts:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/iranian-electionI have been in Iran for exactly one week covering the 2009 Iranian election carnival. Since I arrived, few here doubted that the incumbent firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad would win. My airport cab driver reminded me that the president had visited every province twice in the last four years – "Iran isn't Tehran," he said. Even when I asked Mousavi supporters if their man could really carry more than capital, their responses were filled with an Obamasque provisional optimism – "Yes we can", "I hope so", "If you vote." So the question occupying the international media, "How did Mousavi lose?" seems to be less a problem of the Iranian election commission and more a matter of bad perception rooted in the stubborn refusal to understand the role of religion in Iran.
As far as international media coverage is concerned, it seems that wishful thinking got the better of credible reporting. It is true that Mousavi supporters jammed Tehran traffic for hours every night over the last week, though it was rarely mentioned that they did so only in the northern well-to-do neighborhoods of the capital. Women did relax their head covers and young men did dance in the street.
On Monday night at least 100,000 of the former prime minister's supporters set up a human chain across Tehran. But, hours before I had attended a mass rally for the incumbent president that got little to no coverage in the western press because, on account of the crowds, he never made it inside the hall to give his speech. Minimal estimates from that gathering have been placed at 600,000 (enthusiasts say a million). From the roof I watched as the veiled women and bearded men of all ages poured like lava.
Perhaps from the start Mousavi was destined to fail as he hoped to combine the articulate energies of the liberal upper class with the business interests of the bazaar merchants. The Facebook campaigns and text-messaging were perfectly irrelevant for the rural and working classes who struggle to make a day's ends meet, much less have the time to review the week's blogs in an internet cafe. Although Mousavi tried to appeal to such classes by addressing the problems of inflation and poverty, they voted otherwise.Western media are naturally going to be sympathetic to Mousavi, but as I mentioned on another thread, just because there are demonstrations in Tehran doesn't mean that people in the rest of the country are equally unhappy.
It wouldn't be the first time that reporters who don't know the language, don't know the culture, and never set foot outside the Westernized neighborhoods failed to understand what is going on in a non-Western country and just concentrated on the surface. The prime example would be the journalists who believed that the Shah of Iran was popular because he spoke good English and encouraged Westernization and were astonished at the massive support for Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.