This paper challenges the common notion that Ahmadinejad won the 2005 elections thanks to the votes of the marginalized in the rural areas and the lower classes with lower levels of education, and shows that his base was mostly a Persian-speaking well-educated urban middle class. This is achieved employing multinomial logistic regression and ecological inference on Iran’s socioeconomic data to investigate the profile of the Iranian voters who chose to vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and 2009 Iranian Presidential Elections and set it in the context of class cleavages in the Iranian society and politics. Such a result also negates the common notion that Iran’s middle class is the bastion of a liberal-minded reform movement, and its enlargement would result in democratization and progress towards liberal democracy. Rather, the Iran’s new urban middle class consists of at least two large factions, with both having their roots in the post-revolution state-building and developmentalism. The paper suggests that Ahmadinejad’s victory and administration, owing to this “other” middle class, was not an aberration and break from the preceding two presidencies and a class upheaval as it has been suggested by analysts and politicians, but an internal struggle of the middle class with consensus on economy, but differences in social and cultural ideas. Keywords: Iran elections, urban middle class, liberalization, ecological inference