This chapter uses the story of a Peronist broker mobilizing electoral support in an Argentine slum for the center-right coalition Cambiemos – the opposition to the Peronists – to introduce the central questions of this book: Why do parties rely on brokers to reach voters in slums? How can challenger parties recruit brokers to credibly compete with, and beat, hegemonic machine parties in impoverished districts? Why would brokers switch to work for a nonmachine party? The case of Cambiemos’ 2015 victory over Peronism in poor municipalities in Argentina offers valuable insights into how parties can unexpectedly challenge entrenched machine parties in democracies in the Global South and under what conditions brokers might change their party affiliation.

This chapter uses qualitative and quantitative evidence to demonstrate that internal strife among the Peronist Party’s candidates was crucial in Cambiemos’ rise to power in Argentina in 2015. These divisions even paved the way for Cambiemos to secure the executive positions in eleven of the thirty-three municipalities in the Conurbano Bonaerense, a traditional Peronist stronghold. Peronist infighting benefited Cambiemos in two ways: First, it weakened the electoral competitiveness of Peronist mayoral candidates; second, it left defeated Peronist brokers from the primaries available for recruitment by the opposition. Cambiemos’ local candidates capitalized on this opportunity, building their own networks to challenge Peronist candidates in poor municipalities.

For the 2019 election, as President Mauricio Macri’s popularity waned, Cambiemos mayors needed to decouple their reelection prospects from those of their presidential candidate. This endeavor required broker networks capable of supporting their campaigns by customizing messages, resources, and ballots to align with voters’ electoral preferences. This chapter explores how Cambiemos mayors in the Conurbano turned to these territorial network strategies. Using in-depth interviews and extensive fieldwork, the chapter illustrates how local Cambiemos candidates leveraged these strategies to survive the election. The chapter also quantitatively tests the hypothesis that brokers are crucial for mayoral candidates’ electoral survival when their presidential candidate is underperforming. It particularly focuses on ticket splitting as a key method for candidates to detach from their parties, serving as an effective proxy for assessing their network strategies. Analyzing the distribution of clipped ballots across electoral circuits offers a deeper understanding of how Cambiemos mayors used their punteros to strategically separate from Macri.