A detailed, focused comparison of six single‐mandate Duma election contests in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan in 1993 reveals that state executive power, campaign quality and ‘institutionalized electorates’ best explain which candidates emerged victorious. Every candidate backed by the republic's top authorities won, but by methods better described as machine politics than as fraud. Campaigns were effective primarily when they were directed at a constituency that had long been institutionalized as a self‐conscious group under Soviet rule, mainly agrarians and ethnic Russians in Bashkortostan. Money alone had little impact on voting results: while all winning candidates had access to significant financial resources, most of the republic's biggest spenders lost resoundingly. Preliminary investigation suggests that institutionalized electorates are growing in importance, perhaps becoming even more powerful than state actors in the single‐mandate district contests.