ToI poll: Netanyahu’s bloc leads, Likud tied for 1st, as voters fret over election’s outcome

The bloc of parties supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken the lead with less than a month to go until Israel’s October 27 election, and his Likud party is tied for the most votes with Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition Yashar faction, according to a new poll by The Times of Israel’s sister site, Zman Yisrael.

But the prime minister’s supporters, as well as the bloc of four Jewish-led parties opposing him, are both far from winning a majority of the 120-seat Knesset, the poll finds.

The poll is the latest one in recent weeks to show Netanyahu’s presumed bloc pulling ahead, after months in which nearly every poll showed his supporters trailing the presumed opposition bloc.

The shift has sparked anxiety among Netanyahu’s opponents, the poll finds, with 88% saying they are worried about the election’s outcome. But the other side is also uneasy, with nearly 70% of Netanyahu’s supporters saying they’re worried about the result.

Overall, the poll finds that more than 80% of voters are worried about the election’s outcome.

The poll finds that the parties supporting Netanyahu would collectively win 53 seats in the Knesset, while the four Jewish-led parties opposed to him would win 49. Both camps are far from a 61-seat majority.

Arab-led parties, which also oppose Netanyahu but have rarely been included in governing coalitions, would win 13, while a non-aligned party led by Yoaz Hendel and Yaron Zelekha would win five seats.

Sitting atop the poll are Likud and Yashar, with 21 seats each. Previous polls had shown Yashar in the lead by a few seats.

Next come two opposition parties, B’Yachad and Yisrael Beytenu, with 10 seats each. The Sephardi Haredi Shas party would win nine, followed by three parties with eight seats each: the left-wing Democrats, the Arab-led Joint List and the Ashkenazi Haredi United Torah Judaism.

The far-right Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism-Zehut parties would win six and five seats, respectively. The Arab-led Ra’am would also win five, as would the Hendel-Zelekha faction. The right-wing, pro-Netanyahu People of Israel party, led by Ofer Winter, would win four.

The poll was conducted on September 30 and October 1 by Yossi Tatika of Tatika Research & Media in collaboration with the Adgenda panel, and surveyed a total sample of 500 respondents with a margin of error of ±4.4%.

While horse-race polls are an almost daily occurrence in Israel in the months leading up to elections and are not seen as overly reliable, taken together, the surveys can often serve as a general gauge of the political climate and where the vote may be headed.