Bidzina Ivanishvili, leader of the Georgian Dream coalition.Results are in from last week’s hotly contested parliamentary elections in Georgia, and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition looks to have won control of the country’s parliament, having beaten the once-overwhelmingly dominant ruling United National Movement. More than a political upset, the opposition win seems to have upturned the dynamics of the Georgian political landscape.

Though roils caused by the prison-abuse scandal helped supercharge the stakes, few analysts were sanguine about Ivanishvili’s chances of wresting control from the United National Movement’s comprehensive parliamentary supermajority. International polls seemed to underline this sensibility, with a widely circulated August poll from the National Democratic Institute showing a commanding twenty-five-point lead by the ruling party. Given its near-total media monopoly and a pre-electoral environment methodically oriented in the ruling party’s favor, few anticipated an opposition breakthrough of this election’s speed and size.

Initial signs on election night seemed to confirm skepticism over opposition prospects. Although exit polls showed Georgian Dream with a commanding lead in the proportional vote, President Mikheil Saakashvili simultaneously contended that single-mandate contests would preserve the UNM majority—just as interior-ministry forces stormed polling stations in a regional town. But only hours later, Georgian Dream was celebrating victory as Saakashvili conceded defeat, a turn of events that defied both the ruling party’s expectations and even the most sober Western assessments. How was the conventional wisdom so wrong?

Clearly, few anticipated the deep well of public support for Ivanishvili’s coalition, particularly in the regions outside the capital, which has long been the stronghold of UNM power. Many visitors and journalists who spent their time primarily in Tbilisi’s manicured central districts and along board-approved tourism routes caught few glimpses of the devastating poverty that still grips the Georgian countryside outside the shadows of the five-star hotels.

Mamuka Tsereteli, director of the Center for Black Sea-Caspian Studies at American University, explains this disconnect as the result of a “virtual reality” created by the Georgian government.

“This [UNM] government is very smart, very articulate,” he said, noting that UNM leaders successfully courted Western visitors by showing off the country’s rapid face-lift and a dose of classic Georgian hospitality. “They were good salespeople of this virtual reality and sold it to the West as if it was the whole story.”

But it wasn’t the whole story. When Ivanishvili burst onto the political scene last fall, the billionaire improbably gave voice to many Georgians who had been left behind by the government’s manic reform program, which was heavy on glass buildings and swank promenades but seemingly little concerned with more prosaic issues such as poverty, state impunity and the country’s stubbornly stratospheric unemployment rate. Conversely, considering the state’s de facto domination of the economy, the choicest jobs were generally reserved for the politically connected. Though a summer cabinet shuffle saw the creation of a state ministry to combat unemployment—a curious redundancy with the economic ministry—the move was likely too little, too late for many Georgian voters.

If the Georgian government was unable to see it, so too were its friends and counterparts in the West, who were impressed by Georgian GDP growth and its high rankings on international indices. And the UNM and its leadership, which had long been enthusiastic partners to the United States and Western Europe, had become a metonym to many analysts—and especially the more casual observers—for modernization and liberalism in a region traditionally hostile to both.

Sam Patten, an American political consultant who has advised both the UNM and, more recently, Georgian Dream leader Irakli Alasania, told me that symbols and first impressions remain a powerful currency in places like Washington. “People get too comfortable with their friends—that’s why they got it wrong.”

“In the two nanoseconds that [Western policy makers] have, they remember they like [Saakashvili]—excitable, maybe, but part of the charm,” says Patten, stressing the challenge of getting people to reevaluate their assumptions midstream. “Getting it right means being nimble in your thinking, and that can be very tough sometimes.”

Even those situations that should have raised red flags—such as a brutal 2007 crackdown, Georgia’s competitive authoritarian stagnation and the prison scandal—failed to alert all but a few Georgia watchers of the UNM’s unraveling popularity. And much-touted polls, bandied as proof of the ruling party’s popular support, only seem to demonstrate that a strong plurality of respondents were unwilling to honestly state their preferences—possibly out of fear of political reprisals.

“The government was able to cast themselves as a positive force and the opposition as a negative force,” points out Tsereteli, who believes that preferences for simple narratives allowed “monolithic” views of the electoral contest to take root. This view was echoed by Patten, who noted the Georgian government’s success in crafting a brand around such dynamics.

“The Georgian [UNM] government had a great PR operation,” says Patten, pointing out that Georgian Dream's own operation was “less smooth.”

But the UNM’s public-relations savvy may have contributed to their own downfall. Surrounded by an extensive strategic-communications infrastructure that sought to define the race as a stark geopolitical choice between the liberal West and pro-Moscow kleptocracy, the UNM and its advisers were blindsided by a referendum mostly based around domestic concerns.

For the foreign-policy community, the Georgian election is a cautionary tale of the dangers of mistaking branding for reality and choosing personalities over institutions. Given such a misread by the West of ground-level realities and apparent faith in the ruling party’s ability to stay in power, it’s fortunate that the Georgian people have chosen a party that has pledged to continue the country’s Western path.

When Ivanishvili announced his political goals in fall 2011, many found it easy to write him off as yet another curious addition—if an outsized one—to Georgia’s drama-prone politics. But with his party set to control a majority of seats in Georgia’s parliament, no one is writing him off anymore.

Michael Hikari Cecire is an Black Sea and Eurasia regional analyst and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where he contributes to the Project on Democratic Transitions.