ToI poll: Ofer Winter falls short of Knesset, pro-Netanyahu bloc drops to 51 seats

A new poll from The Times of Israel’s Hebrew sister publication, Zman Yisrael, shows Ofer Winter’s People of Israel party failing to cross the electoral threshold and seemingly bringing the pro-Netanyahu bloc down to 51 seats.

The poll shows that the largest party would be Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar with 24 seats, followed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud with 22 and Naftali Bennet’s B’Yachad with 14. Last week’s poll gave Yashar and Likud 22 seats each.

Next come Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, and ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, all on 9 seats. Yair Golan’s The Democrats and the Joint Arab List get 8 seats each. Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit wins 7 seats, Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am 6, and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism 4.

Along with Winter’s party, the poll also predicts that Benny Gantz’s Blue and White and Yoaz Hendel’s Reservists party will not receive enough votes to enter the Knesset.

That leaves the likely pro-Netanyahu bloc with just 51 seats, while the so-called “change” bloc of anti-Netanyahu Zionist parties would receive 55 seats — both short of the 61 needed to form a government, with the two Arab parties holding the balance of power.

The poll was conducted by Yossi Tatika of Tatika Research & Media in collaboration with the Adgenda panel, and surveyed 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.