Declare victory early, declare victory often: 7 things to know for March 3

1. You wanna crown him, then crown his ass: There are no two ways about it. The press on Tuesday morning is declaring Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu the winner in Monday’s election.

• The headlines on Tuesday morning are a far cry from the confusion of elections 2.0, when nobody knew quite what to make of the exit polls.
• Even in version 1.0, though, as exit polls showed him with a huge victory and assumptions about Yisrael Beytenu led almost everyone to think that he was a lock for the right-wing coalition, Netanyahu’s victory was not declared in black and white as it is here.
• “The message from the elections is clear: getting out of the stalemate means going through Netanyahu,” writes Yedioth Ahronoth’s Nahum Barnea, putting all his eggs in that basket.
• The paper’s front page, which is configured as a broadsheet, features a massive, tilted and not very good picture of Netanyahu taking a selfie and one sideways word “Victory.” What is it trying to say?
• Likud-loving Israel Hayom is even more straightforward, literally and figuratively (though it also makes its front page into a broadsheet), declaring that “the people had their say.”
• “The public voted the way it voted, and no message could be clearer,” writes Mati Tuchfeld in that paper.
• Haaretz, which had been pulling for Netanayhu to lose, is more restrained, putting on a brave face and noting in its lead headline that the right-wing bloc has 60 seats, and Likud is leading Blue and White by 3-5 mandates.

2. Poll-sitters: The declarative headlines are even bolder considering that they are based on exit polling data, which is notoriously unreliable, and printed with the knowledge that by the time they hit doorsteps most of the votes will have been counted, creating the perfect opportunity for a “Dewey Defeats Truman”-type moment.

• The exit polls aren’t even correct as exit polls, with revisions made to them at around 1 a.m. showing the right with only 59 seats, and changing the conversation entirely.
• “If we are talking about 58 seats, we could be talking about another election or a minority government,” Channel 12’s Amit Segal says.
• And that’s not to mention how unreliable the exit polling has proven to be in the past. The results were still so surprising, apparently, that pollster Camil Fuchs risked breaking the law by getting on TV while voting was still happening and declaring that the upcoming exit poll “will be one of the most interesting we’ve ever had… We’re seeing things we hadn’t thought about.”
• Apparently that was a reference to Likud’s surge, which nobody could have imagined would be one or two more seats more than polls had shown it getting just days before. Though two of the exit polls show it getting 37 seats, graphics and other items about who will be in the Knesset only list the names 36 MKs.
• There are also indications that the exit polls leaked out early. Reporting from Likud’s victory party, ToI’s Raphael Ahren notes that even before they were released people were talking about the party getting 37 seats and Blue and White around 30 or less.

3. Tarrying tally: Lucky for the print publications, the vote count is seemingly delayed (as of 7:30 a.m. only 24% of results are posted, vs over 90% by this time in September), so the exit polls are still seen as the truest barometer of where things are headed, at least for now, and are still displayed prominently on news sites.

• Thanks to Israel’s geographic demography, the dribs and drabs of real results posted sluggishly on the Central Election Committee website can swing wildly depending on where the results are posted from (at 6:50 a.m., the two main ultra-Orthodox parties could almost form a coalition by themselves).
• Walla reports that the votes were actually counted, but are just not being released yet.
• Asked about the delay, elections chief Orly Adas tells Channel 12 news that she prefers that the results to be checked to make sure they are as accurate as possible before publishing, noting that they are “taking extra steps” to ensure they are good to go.
• Ynet reports that it could be sundown before almost full results are posted (minus soldiers and hospital patients).
• That’s to say nothing of the dispute over who will count the ballots of the coronavirus quarantined voters. According to several reports, election workers are refusing to touch those ballots.
• Kan’s Dedy Markovich reports on Twitter that they are being kept in a warehouse in the town of Shoham in the meantime. “This is a really dumb thing I can’t understand,” he writes.

4. Screaming like hot takes: The slow ooze of real results isn’t stopping the hot takes from gushing out at lightning speed and every news site is filled with enough “analyses” (most of them are just opinions with little analytic value) to fill a coronavote warehouse.

• Haaretz, which despite looking like a broadsheet features no actual news on its homepage beyond headlines, tabloid-like, instead fills most of its inches with analyses up the wazoo.
• On all three major channels, all night kumsitzes were held around the anchor’s table, with analysts, politicians, journalists, aides and whoever else they could wangle into the room at 3 a.m. gathering to argue about everything from where the country is headed, to Netanyahu’s legal future, to who can yell loudest, thus making them most correct.
• That includes Likud MK Miki Zohar, who essentially moves into the Channel 12 studio (as of 7 a.m. he had seemingly been there for five hours. Among many other things, he tells the station that Likud’s plan is to bring an MK or two from the other side to fill out the coalition, including changing campaign finance laws to make sure there are no sanctions.
• Kan takes the time to transcribe the “stormy responses” to the exit polls during one such exchange.
• In Zman Yisrael, Avner Hofstein writes that Israelis love to watch their news broadcasts, but don’t necessarily love the TV news business: “These are people who once thought of the news as the bread and butter of democracy, but have feared for years that Israeli journalism has lost its soul and is cheating its customers.”
• He surmises that the shift may be thanks to reality TV and its focus on appealing to emotion. “The result is that many journalists convince the public to only think with their hearts and gut, and almost never with their heads.”

5. No justice, no problem: Putting his thinking cap on at Haaretz, Yossi Verter writes that yes Netanyahu won, but it’s too late for him anyway.

• “Even if he builds a coalition of 61, the trial train has left the station. His goal, to escape facing justice, was not realized and will not be realized.”
• Others are not so confident that he will escape justice and see a battle ahead. Yedioth’s Ben-Dror Yemini writes that the voters proved that they believe in Netanyahu, not in the law enforcement community. “60 seats said yes to Netanyahu and no to [former prosecutor] Shai Nitzan.
• Zman’s Shalom Yerushalmi writes that the argument of the people have spoken is exactly what Netanyahu will use with the courts to argue they cannot touch him. “We are looking at an unprecedented clash, perhaps even a constitutional crisis, between the Knesset and the judicial authorities and gatekeepers.”
• In Israel Hayom, Amnon Lord calls the election a “vote of no-confidence in the judicial system.”
• “ The Israeli public prefers Netanyahu even with the three indictments various players have managed to stick him with,” he writes.

6. How the ballot was won: Netanyahu’s victory is seen as sound enough that even some critics can’t help but marvel.

• “He has proven he has no parallel in Israel, perhaps in the world, when it comes to running an election,” writes Yedioth’s Sima Kadmon.
• So how did he do it? ToI’s David Horovitz writes that he was boosted “by an extremely effective get-out-the-vote campaign, which, among other elements, utilized data from the national electoral register to target Likud voters and potential Likud voters, and make sure they actually went to the polls.”
• “And his allegation that Blue and White aimed to form a minority coalition, with the outside support of the Joint List of mainly Arab parties — a claim denied by Gantz, but confirmed by Labor leader Amir Peretz — likely alienated swaths of potential Blue and White voters,” he adds.
• Haaretz’s Ravit Hecht calls the latter “a particularly nasty campaign, achieving the unbelievable: moving voters from the center-left bloc to his camp just before his impending trial.”
• But she says the real news its the way that Netanyahu managed to join together his base — people “who worship his cruelty” — with “people who had enough of all the elections and the uncertainty, preferring to submit to his power. They’re the ones who tipped the scales – not just politically, but morally. Israel has said a resounding yes to Netanyahu’s revolutionary message: Everything in dissolute Israel is allowed.”
• Channel 12’s Elad Simchayoff writes that Netanyahu may have learned from UK leader Boris Johnson, who was able to gain voters who just wanted to be done with Brexit and were willing to hold their noses:
• “It’s possible that at Balfour they understood that the unhappiness of people with the political crisis here was so deep and there were those who were willing to vote for anyone as long as they were close enough to ending the deadlock,” he writes.

7. Hate the game, not the players: So where do we go from here? Despite claims of a massive victory and big loss for Blue and White, some still see unity on the table.

• Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer notes that neither leader explicitly spoke out against unity in their speeches and seemed to leave the possibility open: “Gantz has no option of forming his own coalition. Instead of waiting around for Netanyahu to pick off stragglers and manipulate a split in Kahol Lavan from the wilderness of the opposition, he made his own offer to Netanyahu in his speech. ‘Criminal procedures must be dealt with in court,’ he said, reminding supporters that “in two weeks Benjamin Netanyahu will sit on the defendant’s bench in an Israeli court for three serious crimes.’ Unlike during the campaign, this time Gantz did not add that this disqualifies Netanyahu from serving as prime minister.”
• In ToI, Raoul Wootliff writes, “In a change of tone from his rhetoric on the campaign trail, Netanyahu made an apparent appeal to the other side of the political aisle, saying in his speech to buoyant Likud activists in Tel Aviv, ‘We must avoid any more elections. It’s time to heal the rifts. It’s time for reconciliation.’”
• But he adds: “For Gantz to join a Netanyahu government he would have to completely renege on his campaign promise not to serve under a prime minister who has been indicted, walking back dozens of vows to never do so.”
• Israel Hayom’s Akiva Bigman writes that “in any normal situation, results as we see them in the three elections would lead to a stable government in some constellation or another. There is no reason to continue to be angry, aside from this obsession around Netanyahu.”
• Even if the numbers don’t demand unity, former Likud minister Limor Livnat writes in Yedioth that “after such a dirty campaign … there is a need to close the rift, heal the wounds and unite Israeli society.”