Kenyans have hunkered down for the longest wait of the 21-year-old multiparty era for presidential election results for several days now.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), the most seemingly non-governmental, and also the most trusted, polls referee organisation in the history of Kenyan electioneering, had initially promised results within 48 hours of the vote.

This ambitious pledge was based on a brand-new biometric registration, tallying and transmission system that took a piggy-back ride on the electronic backbone of ICT giant Safaricom.

However, this system promptly all but collapsed not long after Kenyans had voted, stagnating the Presidential vote tally at Uhuru Kenyatta's initial 2.8 million votes (or 53%) and Raila Odinga's 2.1 million (43%) for days on end (see separate analysis on when the results "Went Dark").

It is now becoming increasingly clear that some political strategies worked and others bombed inside this country's biggest, most complex and most earnest general election ever.

The first large-scale political strategy to meet with failure was the American strategy known as the Bradley Effect in the Rift Valley, an overall aim that the Prime Minister and his strategists were relying on heavily in the region.

As we have noted in these columns in recent times, the Bradley Effect theory holds that some voters have a tendency to hide their intentions from opinion pollsters.

In the US before Barack Obama, when white voters planned to vote for a white candidate instead of a black one they would tell pollsters the exact opposite.

The theory is named after Tom Bradley and one electoral event. Bradley was the African-American mayor of Los Angeles who ran for governor of California.

Before the election the opinion polls had him as the unassailable favourite. But he lost to George Deukmejian, his white Republican rival. Experts toted up the surprise reversal to skin-colour factors. The evaporation of an opinion poll lead inside the poll booth on Election Day has since defined the Bradley Effect.

Uhuru beat Bradley Effect and gained Dog Whistle

Uhuru Kenyatta of The National Alliance (TNA) party and William Ruto of the United Republican Party (URP), who comprised the Presidential ticket of the Jubilee coalition, pulled off a stunning surprise in the Rift Valley, virtually retiring the Bradley Effect in that region as far as a joint Kikuyu/Kalenjin vote effort goes.

For the second time in a decade, the Rift Valley vote bloc has overwhelmingly voted for Uhuru as President. And this time it was joined by the biggest bloc in the land, the Mt Kenya vote.

This was a remarkable achievement. Indeed, whether or not UhuRuto can take State House, in terms of conflict resolution, their achievement will long be hailed as a miracle of reconciliation and healing.

It is the Rift Valley, after all, and the factor of Kikuyu post-Independence settlement there in particular, that has been the epicenter of both pre- and post-election violence in the multiparty era.

The post-election violence (PEV) of the 2007 general election saw the eviction of 650,000 Kenyans, the great bulk of them Kikuyu, take place mostly in the Rift Valley, as well as some of the worst atrocities that took some 1,350 lives.

Analysts fully expected the Uhuru-Ruto deal to amount to little more than an individuals' "Coalition of the Accused", arising from their indictments at the International Criminal Court in The Hague on crimes-against-humanity charges arising from the 2007-08 PEV.

Raila's other borrowed leaf from US political strategy, so-called dog-whistle politics, whereby an audience is given a for-public-consumption message that also resonates at a subgroup level in ways that are undetectable to the larger audience, also failed in Rift Valley.

Here, Raila's strategists had worked on age-long Kalenjin resentment of Kikuyu settlement in the choicest land in Rift Valley, including the former White Highlands, some of the best farmland on the planet.

The implication was that another Kikuyu President - and a Kenyatta to boot - would mean even more Kikuyu settlement on choice RV acreage.

Uhuru and Ruto clearly had a superior and evidently much more persuasive dog-whistle politics narrative in the Rift Valley. Indeed, it was so subtle analysts will still be unpicking it months from now.

It speaks volumes, therefore, of their skills and competences as battleground region campaigners that the indictees were able to persuade two so large and such diverse vote blocs to come together in one of the most remarkable poll pacts of this or any other country.

Hapless Mudavadi walked bang into Bradley Effect

Instead, the Bradley Effect worked big time in Western Kenya, where Wycliffe Musalia Mudavadi of the United Democratic Forum (UDF) and the Amani coalition saw his dream of constituting a Third Force and gaining a regional bargaining chip to become a kingmaker in the event of a rerun of the State House race evaporate on Election Day.

Mudavadi had calculated that the Luhya vote bloc of Kenya's second most populous community would unite largely behind him. On Election Day Luhyaland voted for Raila's Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (Cord), leaving him high and dry and flapping in the wind.

The Bradley Effect was also thoroughly at work on the lesser candidates, with the exception perhaps of rank but entertaining outsider Mohamed Dida.

Martha Karua, Peter Kenneth, and Paul Muite all saw the single-digit opinion poll numbers they had clung to like straws dip well below freezing point.

Kenyans have clearly learnt the trick of sounding thoughtful, even sage, and "issues-oriented" when being debriefed by opinion pollsters - and then reverting to type and doing the exact opposite.

How Raila blew Dog Whistle on Uhuru in Coast

Raila's greatest success with the dog-whistle politics strategy happened at the Coast, a region that Uhuru and Ruto expended much time, effort and money in, but received little in return.

By making the Land Question a central issue of the campaign, Raila deliberately stigmatised Uhuru throughout the region. The mind of the ordinary man and woman anywhere in Kenya boggles when confronted with the prospect of land ownership acreages in the range (pardon the pun) of, say, 30,000 acres.

"Isn't that bigger than the central business district?" they gawk. When, during one of the presidential debates, Uhuru admitted on live TV and radio to land ownership even more extensive than this at the Coast, Raila's dog-whistle politics patrols pounced, going on the offensive, urging the people to try and picture that level of land ownership in an area that the owner does not even come from. For the most part, that did the trick. Cord swept the Coast.

Raila's 'Southern Strategy' trump card

No other Kenyan political operative has ever consciously mobilised the American Southern Strategy political gambit in Kenyan politics on a national scale but Raila Amolo Odinga.

Daniel arap Moi may have groped at it in the dark during his long presidency, but he did not know of it by name and concept. Indeed, Moi had Kikuyus for VP throughout his 24 years in power, with the exception of his final, totally lame-duck, 90 days in office, when he installed Mudavadi.

The Southern Strategy involves disabling a regional majority vote bloc through encirclement by many smaller blocs until it is outnumbered.

Raila first whipped up the Southern Strategy in 2002, on behalf of Mwai Kibaki and against Uhuru and the incumbent but non-contender Moi.

Then he applied it against Kibaki himself in 2007, as the 41-against-1 strategy. In 2013, he was at it again, once more against Uhuru, and, by extension, against the incumbent but non-contender Kibaki.

When he saw and received reports of the millions of Kenyans waiting in literally daylong queues for their chance to vote in only the second presidential transition poll in Kenya, Raila must have had no doubt in his mind that they were voting with a vengeance.

The rest of the country is all-too-aware that the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin had had the pleasure during the first 49 years of Independence of providing Kenya with tenants of State House.

And the rest of the country now has little doubt that it has prevented the continuation of this trend into the start of a second half-century of Independence, hence the implicit belief in very large swathes of the country - outside Central Kenya and Rift Valley - in an Odinga victory.

However, as we went to press, all indications were of a rerun of the presidential race. Among other crunch-time factors, a rerun would be the first real test of the amazing Kalenjin-Kikuyu poll pact and modus vivendi of Round One.