Israel General Elections || 23.03.2021

[Oryxslayer]

Updated Channel 12 Numbers:

Likud: 31
Yesh Atid: 18
Joint List: 9
Shas: 8(-1)
Yamina: 8
B&W: 8(+1)
Labor: 7
Religious Zionists: 7
Meretz: 7(+1)
UTJ: 6
New Hope: 6
YiB: 5(-1)
Ra’am: 0

Yeah there's a lot of uncertainty with the data.

[Oryxslayer]

I thought you guys said the results were shocking?

I mean it does certainly look like a shockingly bad performance from Sa'ar.

If you want an example of stable polarization between factions, Sa'ar+B&W are basically equal to the number of Gantz MKs elected under B&W last time. Any variation is basically captured by YB and Yamina.

[Oryxslayer]

Channal 13 updated:

31 Likud
17 Yesh Aitd
9 Shas
8 B&W
8 JL
7 Labor
7 YB
7 Yamina
7 Mereretz
7 UTJ
6 Religious Zionists
6 New Hope

Bibi + Yamina at 60.

[Oryxslayer]

By the way, Channel 11 now projects Ra'am may pass the threshold LOL.

[Oryxslayer]

Something to note: Likud is getting non-negligible percentages in the Arab towns. Its most notable in Rahat, Fureidis, Zarzir, and the towns north of Kiryat Tiv'on. Likud's ad campaign had a effect. HOWEVER. In most cases it appears that the percentage Likud is receiving is similar to the percentage of voters who didn't vote Joint List during their triumph of 2020. So it appears Likud flipped the Arabs who already voted from Jewish parties, and then former JL Arabs moves towards the Secular left as a reaction to this campaign or maybe to give a majority to a govt that would help them pandemic-wise.

[Oryxslayer]

cheering for raam to hopefully stay above 3.25

You do know Ra'am prefers Bibi to YA/Sa'ar and is willing to go into government with him, right?

Ra'am has said it will NOT support a govt with the Kahanists, and vice versa, so that option is mathematically off the table. Doesn't matter.

[Oryxslayer]

Is the Arab vote in israel sort of like the black vote was for dems for much of 90s and early 2000s?

aka, huge untapped potential in terms of voter turnout?

Yes and No. Yes as far as turnout is concerned. No as in their loyalty to Arab parties like AA loyalties to Dems. Factionalism is not just a Jewish thing, the Israeli Arabs have always been diverse in their preferences when analyzed. Its just that the largest and most concentrated arab settlements are Arab party strongholds for a variety of economic, religious, and identity reasons, so its easy to generalize the demographic as homogenous.

For example, Christian Arabs are likely to have higher educations and earn more than your average Israeli Jew.

[Oryxslayer]

it's not worth it at all for netanyahu to accept raam into his government. Court arab voters? Sure. Actually accept raam, lolno.

cheering for raam to hopefully stay above 3.25

You do know Ra'am prefers Bibi to YA/Sa'ar and is willing to go into government with him, right?

Ra'am has said it will NOT support a govt with the Kahanists, and vice versa, so that option is mathematically off the table. Doesn't matter.

The Ra'am option is impossible because the Kahanists literally want to strip citizenship of all Arab citizens. Abbas and Ben Gvir denounced each others intentions when Ra'am talked about supporting Likud. The Kahanists are key to Likuds hypothetical majority, so a different coalition would need to be discovered in order for the Ra'am option to work.

[Oryxslayer]

Is the count slower this year due to COVID-19 and the need for social distancing at counting centers ?

I would blame the ~30% more voting sites this year to preserve distancing, so more data needs to be collected from more places.

[Oryxslayer]

For those unexperienced with the Israeli vote count, or unable to read a Hebrew excel file:

This is the part of the night where the Jerusalem count races ahead of other large cities and skews the vote total. Jerusalem is a Haredi and Religious Zionist stronghold for obvious reasons, and Likud dominates the other half of the vote. It is usually assisted it its partisan effort by smaller yet still large areas like Ashdod, Bnei Brak, and Bet Shemesh. So the votes counted are unrepresentative of the final total.

For example, Tel Aviv has only 5.6K votes counted to Jerusalem's 100k. Interestingly Haifa is keeping up with Jerusalem this time.

[Oryxslayer]

So based on the above numbers, is this currently the case?

Code:

Anti-Netanyahu	47.51
Pro-Netanyahu	46.67
Yamina		5.82

More accurately:

46.67% Pro-Netanyahu
36.84% Anti-Netanyahu
9.18% Arabs
5.82% Yamina.

So no majority for Bibi right now, with a skewed count, but also no majority for a non-Bibi govt. Non-Bibi's vote percent traditionally goes up later in the count but they might need the polls to be off to pass Pro-Bibi without the Arabs but with Yamina.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/IsraelexLive/status/1374318103220383745


lmfao. How stupid are the people of Gideon Sa'ar?

The Hope for Change party currently only has 493, comparable to other small parties, whereas Sa'ar right now has 86,337. If there was a Butterfly Ballot effect, it was miniscule. The point of the big Hebrew characters is to prevent confusion, and Taf is not similar to Resh linguistically.

on a different note, that particular account keeps liking to a forecast based on the current vote which, at the moment, has the bibi bloc on 62?]

Note what I said above about Jerusalem and the skews of the count. Its normal.

[Oryxslayer]

Is anyone seeing where the remaining 20% should come from? Enough to flip 3 seats from the Bibi bloc?

Probably some flips what I am seeing. Shas certainly isn't going to end at 10. A big vote pool uncounted right now is the Bedouin villages in the Negev, and that could push Ra'am over.

[Oryxslayer]

The latest update included the Bedouin villages. Ra'am past threshold at 4%. Probably won't be getting too many more votes, so this total needs to survive the remaining 550-600K.

[Oryxslayer]

The latest update included the Bedouin villages. Ra'am past threshold at 4%. Probably won't be getting too many more votes, so this total needs to survive the remaining 550-600K.

The prison vote usually gives the Arab parties an extra mandate, so there us that.

Yeah that is Ra'am's last big pool, but its just more doubles. Remaining E-Day vote appears to be scattered across all the populous areas, slightly weighted towards the Tel-Aviv region. Then there's the usual Double Envelopes and the generous pool of Covid related additional ballots which we won't know about for a day or two. Given the unequal vaccination distribution there may be a good number of Arabs in the Covid pool, but that's just guessing.

[Oryxslayer]

Another 14K voted counted. Not much change. All the .01% or so gainers were Secular Jewish parties.

[Oryxslayer]

Do we know how Ra'am leans, because it seems their support either way could be decisive.

The chairman was on the radio now saying he’ll negotiate with whoever. Bibi’s base is divided on this

An as noted previously, campaign talk is cheap. Its not Likud whose the danger, its their potential Block allies who would divest themselves of government if an Arab party backs it. The Ra'am option is mathematically hard to get to 61 even if Abbas is available.

[Oryxslayer]

When's the vote reporting guy waking up and giving us more results

None have come in since the 15k drop a few hours ago...which is funny cause the elections commission said they projected  near 100% (discounting double envelopes) about 3 hours ago.

EDIT: right on que another 9K votes added to the system. Still have 500K to go till projected turnout.

[Oryxslayer]

Bit of a dumb question: If there's no obvious candidate for PM besides Bibi, and Bibi doesn't have a working majority, why couldn't he just form a minority cabinet like in the UK and cut deals with other parties on a case by case basis?

Only really works if the parties are willing to cut deals. Which in the most simple fashion requires confidence and support like the DUP offered to the Tories, or the Scottish Greens to SNP. When half the anti-Likud blocks main problem with working with Likud is Netanyahu personally, that's impossible unless you bend over backwards ideologically for the other half.

[Oryxslayer]

Would not a more ideological consistent ruling bloc be if New Hope joins the Likud bloc? I get New Hope already said during the election they will not do so but post election everything should be up for grabs again.

Sa'ar literally tried to primary Netanyahu. For New Hope to join Likud in govt Bibi must leave, or New Hope Mks would need to defect on their own. But the Ra'am option, which is touted and the likeliest one, is probably impossible as well. Everyone rushed ahead of themselves based on campaign rhetoric when they forgot the religious Zionists have no problem leaving a govt they have stated problems with, as Yamina did last year.

[Oryxslayer]

A few thousand more votes were added just now, continuing the trend of a trickle of results across the hours. I only bring this up because Meretz is perpetually close from taking a seat from Ra'am based on the current projections.

[Oryxslayer]

Recently woke up, good to see the Double Envelopes got counted fast. Looks like we are back at a defectors-needed situation for govt given the mutual distrust of certain faction members.

[Oryxslayer]

Anyway, I think one of the big takeaways from Round 4 should be the seemingly monolithic stability of the various political poles. One has known this for a while-its the defining trait of multiparty polarization, but votes were finally presented with a semi-new party alignment and not much changed. Bibi + National Religious is still essentially the same size as previously, the only things that really changes is how much Likud decides to eat their partners each cycle. The Haredim and Yisrael Beiteinu are stable. The Secularist "change" camp didn't change preferences, just move around. However on defines the Gantz side of B&W (Masorti, Security, Centrist, etc) stayed the same, some voters just migrated to Sa'ar. Lapid's Secular Liberal side was stable. The minor Left-Secularist voter base is still there, they just regained some voters previously on "loan" to the untied B&W change party in previous cycles.

The one group of factions which isn't stable are the Arabs. We have had elections where the factions united unanimously behind the Joint List, an we have had ones with a fragmented vote. Turnout fluctuates and opinions change. In hindsight it is clear Likud understood this from the past three cycles, and therefore tried to "massage" the Arab vote in a dozen ways in an attempt to widen the gap between voter preferences and Knesset seats enough to give his coalition majority of seats. This  however has failed and Bibi probably won't get a second try at these tactics. Arab turnout went down and some Arab factions previously open to voting for Jewish parties voted Likud, but more Arabs broke from the Joint list in favor of the Secularists, Labor and Meretz especially. The combined breakaways though weren't enough for Ra'am to drop below the threshold and negate their votes. All told Arab voters successfully tactically voted and to enlarge those Secular parties threatened by the threshold and kept the Arab parties above the threshold, also once again denying Likud their majority.




In an unrelate note, something that because very clear this cycle in that Yisrael Beiteinu did well with the Druze. I'm not sure why, maybe someone more in the know can explain. Previously most of these areas went solidly for the unified B&W ticket, but not all. YB won a bunch of the Druze towns in the North and Golan, and received solid percentages in many others.

[Oryxslayer]

Arab turnout went down and some Arab factions previously open to voting for Jewish parties voted Likud, but more Arabs broke from the Joint list in favor of the Secularists, Labor and Meretz especially.

I don't see any evidence from the results that new Likud voters come from other Jewish parties rather than from the Joint list or from new voters. checking the results by locality for places where Likud had a decent increase:

Ha-ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is “Never get involved in a land war in Asia,” but only slightly less well known is this: “Never compare vote percentages before accounting for turnout!"

In all seriousness, you got to download the excel and do the work to actually get a sense of the data.

Locality	Likud2020	Others 2020	Likud2021	Others2021
בסמת טבעון	33	348	303	537
גש גוש חלב	11	394	148	376
פסוטה	21	327	125	433
טובאזנגריה	28	340	286	522
נאעורה	3	82	70	168
רהט	136	1677	1026	2526
אבו גוש	280	525	476	665
פוריידיס	19	186	173	598
נאעורה	3	82	70	168

Yes, there are outlier places like ראס עלי, or אל סייד, but far more common is the situation where Likud gains less than the total non-Arab 2020 vote. This is especially the case in the monolithic Triangle or Northern towns where it was more a case of Likud going from 0% to 5%, rather than a good showing. I'm sure if we did a deeper analysis and compared election 1 where there was multiple Arab parties, we would see the non-JL vote grow.

In the end though, there is no service where you can pay money to know who voted precisely how like in the US, so we don't know if Likud found new voters, pulled from the Joint List, or pulled from the other parties. However it is awfully convenient in most cases that the Likud 2021 vote in Arab areas is equal to or less than the Non-JL 2020 vote. My theory is that Likud pulled these non-JL voters who were already open to voting for Jewish parties and didn't vote for the List when it was strongest through its campaign, but the campaign prompted a similar backlash among some of the former JL voters angry at Likud's double-dealing (Arab appeals-Kahan alliance), or just comprised internally in an attempt to give non-Likud mainly-Jewish parties a majority-to get around the YB-Joint List distrust. They voted for the most approachable of the opposition like Labor, Yesh Atid, and Meretz. But that's just a theory.

[Oryxslayer]

so what's the likelihood of their not being a 5th election & more importantly is anything actually going to change at election no.5 to stop it leading to no.6?

Well as brought up previously, the Knesset will have to elect a (HoS) President before the summer and if a government isn't inaugurated than Gantz rotates into the PM slot in November and gets all the powers and privileges of that office - even if the Likud ministers still prefer to listen to Bibi. Both developments have the potential to disrupt the stalemate if Israel goes to round 5, either by encouraging turnout in certain factions or by having others and their politicians reevaluate who they prefer governing with. What happens because of these events is a future question, but one that will effect round 5.

I can't tell you though if said election is inevitable or if there is a realistic possibility of govt though: plenty of politicians are circulating theoretical coalitions proposals but none seem all that likely given party preferences.