This chapter presents the theoretical argument and the contributions of the book to the existing literature on clientelism, machine parties, and party adaptation. It offers a novel perspective on how strong competitors to dominant machine parties emerge in impoverished districts. Challenging parties can defy hegemonic machine parties, not by altering their policy programs, but by recruiting brokers to compete for the votes of the poor. Brokers’ commodification and machine parties’ factionalism can provide challengers with the opportunity to build their own broker networks to compete with machine parties. In the Global South, it is not economic development but rather poverty and vulnerability that can create the conditions for the rise of party competition against dominant machines.