Blich school mock elections, once seen as prophetic, hand Lapid’s Yesh Atid easy win

A poll at a Tel Aviv-area high school once seen as a bellwether of general election results has given Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party a landslide victory over Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, in contrast to public surveys which consistently place the latter ahead.

In yesterday’s mock elections by eleventh and twelfth graders at the Ramat Gan Blich High School, Yesh Atid has won a whopping 45.1% of electoral votes, while Likud garnered 24% of the votes.

Lapid took to Twitter to thank the students for his victory, and expressed hope that “also this time they will correctly predict the real results.” However, while up until 2013 the traditional Blich poll was seen as a largely reliable forecaster of election results, in more recent years it has been inaccurate.

The centrist National Unity party received 12.4% of the votes, Labor got 5%, and the far-right Religious Zionism — which includes extremist Itamar Ben Gvir, who visited the school recently — got 4.6%. Meretz, Yisrael Beytenu, the Joint List (which recently broke up into Hadash-Ta’al and Balad factions), both ultra-Orthodox parties, and the Fiery Youth protest party failed to meet the 3.25% election threshold in the poll.

Under the circumstances predicted by the Blich election, parties opposing Netanyahu would comfortably form a government.