Prez dispenser: What the press is saying on November 2

1. There may be blood: Israel is cuckoo for American elections Monday morning, with a full day to go before actual Election Day.

• As of 8 a.m. Monday, nearly every Israeli news outlet has an election-related story as its top item.
• That is a level of interest not seen even in many US media markets. At Cleveland.com for instance, the top story is football related, followed by coronavirus, more football and finally the election. The same goes for the Oregonian, where it’s jobs, coronavirus, murder and then elections. Even in the suddenly interesting state of Texas, the Dallas Morning News leads off with their Cowboys’ abysmal performance on the football field, with the elections in the 2 slot.
• Lest one think it’s just a coincidence, or timing, the static front pages of print publications go even more bonkers. Both Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom fill their front pages with a single story. “Trump and Biden in a battle over the Midwest,” reads the headline in the latter. A special broadsheet edition of Israel Hayom gives the whole top of the fold of A1 to the election, leading off with commentary claiming that Democrats are more worried about what comes after a loss than a loss itself.
• Why so much interest? It could be the same morbid fascination with disaster that keeps Americans going to Nascar races week after week. As Ynet’s top headline puts it: “Violence, legal challenges and discarded votes: Fears of election chaos.”
• “On the ground they are reporting on preparation by armed militias for violent confrontations, and businesses are continuing to board up out of fears of looting by rioters who refuse to accept the results,” notes the news site.
• Army Radio’s Efi Triger leads off his broadcast by noting that chances are we will not know the results of the election by Tuesday night, but former diplomat Alon Pinkas tells him that “on Wednesday at 7 a.m. Eastern Time in the US, we’ll know the results of a few states — including Florida, North Carolina and maybe Georgia. If Biden is well ahead, the results will be known.”
• That of course discounts the lawsuits and legal challenges, which form the focus of Channel 12 news’s main election story, headlined “Trump is getting the ground ready to challenge the election results.”
• The channel also jumps on the Axios report that Trump will declare victory early if the initial results show him winning. “This is despite the fact that more than 90 million Americans voted before election day, and the vast majority of these votes will not be counted that night — votes that of course can influence the election.”

2. Asking for a friend, but how unshakable is that unshakable bond? Walla news, which already has its special election homepage design out and looking all pretty, leads off with a column explaining why Israelis should care what happens in America: Namely, Trump’s questioning of legal authorities and other sacred cows has opened the door for Netanyahu to do so as well.

• “ Not by coincidence, the prime minister turned a hate of the media and other gatekeepers into a crusade exactly when Trump won office,” writes Ilan Kafrov. “It’s quite hard to imagine a different reality now, but Netanyahu before Trump would not dare incite against journalists and judges.”
• David Rothkopf is even harsher in Haaretz’s opinion section, but sees the seeds of a Netanyahu shift away from the hand that tweets: “That was clear last week when Trump sought to suggest that no progress could have been made on regional peace deals if the U.S. president had been ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden. Netanyahu, known for his slavering and over-the-top praise of Trump in his presence, demurred, saying that he welcomed the assistance of all Americans in advancing the cause of peace. It would have seemed a perfectly normal, politic thing for an ex-diplomat like Netanyahu to say, had it not been so clear that he was seeking to distance himself from the man in whose pocket he has lived for the past four years. The expression on Trump’s face when his boy let him down was priceless…and telling.”
• The AP also notices Netanyahu seemingly hedging his bets, reporting that “Israel’s leader on Sunday praised President Donald Trump’s Mideast policies, even as he avoided openly taking sides ahead of the U.S. presidential election.”
• Netanyahu’s not alone in keeping his eggs from all going in the same basket. Globes’s Shirit Avitan Cohen notices that a prayer rally for Trump at Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarch’s being put together by settler leader Yochai Damri will not include an appearance by Oded Revivi, the mayor of the Efrat settlement. Responding, Revivi says that while he appreciates Trump, “just as we warn off foreign influences from internal debates and elections … so it is not correct for the leadership to express a stance on the US elections.”
• Even Israel Hayom appears to be shying from its all-Trump-all-the-time coverage, running a column by Dan Sheftman in which he says that Israel-US ties will remain strong no matter what.
• “Presidents come and go. Some are in sync with Israel, other care about its needs much less. But beyond that important distinction, there’s a strong, moral and strategic infrastructure for deep cooperation. It’s survived unfriendly governments in the past,” he writes.

3. Worst election ever: Beyond the pundits, most Israeli news sites have correspondents stationed in the US to report on the election in breathless detail.

• Literally. Both Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth use the cliche that “America is holding its breath” prominently.
• “This is the most fateful election we’ve known,” one woman tells Yedioth’s Orly Azulay in Philadelphia
• Channel 12’s Yona Leibzon offers that “division in America is higher than it’s ever been.” Perhaps she thinks the Civil War was a friendly scrap?
• Kan’s Yaron Deckel joins a group of guys in Trump gear waving Trump flags while walking to a Trump rally in Pennsylvania and asks them whether they think the state will go red or blue. “I don’t care red or blue, but it’s going to be Trump,” one tells them. (All the others say red too, shockingly).
• Also in the US, Boaz Bismuth keeps chugging full steam for Trump, as is normal for news correspondents to do, right? “Biden brings a few hundred cars to his drive-in rallies, sometimes just a few dozen. Trump brings tens of thousands and I’ve been to his rallies. They L-O-V-E him. They know he’s not guilty for the virus. They know he fixed the economy, they know that his heart is in the right place and mostly they know that he speaks and tweets, but also acts.”
• Bismuth puts much stock into a Des Moines Register survey that sees Trump winning the state and extrapolates from that that the survey is correct where all others in the state are wrong, and so every other state survey showing Trump losing is probably wrong too.
• Haaretz, meanwhile, snags a rare interview with former Democratic pollster wunderkind David Shor, who got 2016 wrong, but predicts a Trump loss again. Interestingly, he notes that despite all the upheavals in the US over the last few months, the polls haven’t moved. “I think this indicates something very significant about American politics,” he’s quoted saying. “Take a look at the polling averages from February until now. They’re about the same. The race is stable. There was a pandemic; the biggest recession in the country’s history, according to some measures; many cities have experienced the largest protests they’ve seen in decades – and the polls have barely budged.”

4. Whatchu looking at? There’s also something noteworthy about some of the photo choices made by Israeli news outlets that offer a window into their thinking.

• Yedioth Ahronoth, for instance, runs a full-page photo spread of a shivering Trump making (admittedly) hilariously goofy faces.
• Trump, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found on Haaretz’s front page. Rather the main art is a beautifully artistic shot of Biden and Barack Obama towering over the photographer and joshing with each other against a clear blue sky. It’s as flattering as the Yedioth spread is not.
• Israel Hayom’s main picture of Biden on the inside of its paper shows him on a giant screen in front of a couple dozen supporters, and wouldn’t you know it ‘sleepy Joe’s’ eyes just happen to be closed. Trump’s eyes, hidden under a Maga hat, are presumably open.

• Sometimes strange is just strange, like Channel 12’s news’s virtual tour of the White House which inserts Arad Nir into the Oval Office and other areas of the building he can’t normally go. As one Twitter user remarks “This new version of the Sims is weird.”

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• It’s not a picture, but it’s terrible optics. Makor Rishon reporter Zvika Klein tweets out a picture of a letter sent by six prominent right-wing Israeli rabbis, urging Americans to vote Trump. “If you care about the State of Israel. If you care about World Peace. Please, vote for Donald Trump. To you it is a ballot. To us it is a question of life itself.”

5. To boldly exit: Oh right, the virus, that little thing. The coronavirus does get some attention in the media, especially people complaining.

• A day after schools opened, to parents’ relief, Kan reports that they are still complaining, this time about kids having to wear masks to protect them from a deadly disease, which is just such a bummer. In response, the education and health ministers have agreed to set up a special committee to study allowing kids to throw out their masks with their Zoom passwords.
• Speaking to Army Radio, Prof. Nadav Davidovitch urges decision-makers to keep moving toward a “normal,” albeit with some caution: “We need to remember to go back in a week and a half and look at the numbers to act according to them and not as after the first lockdown. We all understand that we need to move forward, public health is not just the coronavirus, but also the economy and education.”
• Uh oh. Numbers released on Monday show a slight uptick in the number of cases. It’s enough for Channel 12 news to ring the alarm bell, pulling a quote from an always cautious coronavirus taskforce report which advises that “it’s possible the drop in the infection tally has stopped.”
• In Haaretz, Amos Harel writes that any talk of a return to normal without a vaccine is a fool’s game, even if ministers are talking up a quick exit.
• “Their statements in the cabinet meetings indicate that some of the ministers believe we can move quickly through all the stages and restore the economy to full functioning,” he writes. “The truth is that this probably won’t happen before an effective vaccination against the virus is developed, and is available in Israel too. Without it, a continued relaxation of the lockdown will at some point lead to a loss of control over the rate of illness, followed by a renewed lockdown.”
• Luckily, Israel is developing a vaccine, very slowly. The two first test subjects were pricked on Sunday to great fanfare, including Yedioth calling them “vaccine pioneers.”
• “I’m healthy and sure this will be fine,” 26-year-old business student Harel Segev, the Lewis of the pair (to Anar Ottolenghi’s Clark) is quoted saying in the paper. “A lot of people have been hurt by the coronavirus, healthwise, mentally and mostly economically, and if this is a small contribution that I can give to help them, I will do my part.”