The final countdown: What could change the election in the last days
If none of the wobbling parties falls below the threshold, the result may hinge on a seat or two; but if any of Ra’am, Hadash-Ta’al, Labor or Meretz fails, Netanyahu wins easily
With just two days to go until Election Day, the campaign is raging and the parties are scrapping over every vote. But from a polling perspective, it’s over.
According to Israeli election law, no opinion polls are allowed to be published in the final days before the polling day; in this case, from midnight on Friday night. So, from here on in, until the publication of the first exit polls at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, we are in the dark.
As if to make up for that lacuna, the public was bombarded by a mammoth 15 polls this week, all breathlessly reported.
In the final week’s polls, the bloc headed by former prime minister and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu bloc passed the magic 61 seats in the 120-member Knesset six times, for its best polling week in months, and fell just short in the other nine.
Looking back over a longer period, the past month, the Netanyahu bloc passed 61 ten times in 36 polls, or around 28 percent of the time.
So, the instances are becoming more frequent, which will give hope to his supporters.
The final polling average gives his bloc 60.3 seats, as opposed to 55.7 for the current government (and a further four seats for the mainly Arab Hadash-Ta’al party).
The Netanyahu bloc average has ticked up very gradually, by almost half a seat, over the past few weeks, creating a very slight sense of momentum.
We will, however, note an alternative explanation for this uptick.
Throughout the campaign, there has been a slight, but significant, discrepancy between the polls of the four most prolific pollsters (Midgam, Panels Politics, Kantar and Camil Fuchs), working for the biggest media outlets, and other companies, such as Direct Polls, Magar Mochot and Rafi Smith. While the former group has rarely given the Netanyahu bloc 61 seats, the latter group almost always has.
Over the past week there have been five polls from the second group, more than in any previous week, which has served to push up the average. Indeed, the chart below shows that there are few signs of momentum for Netanyahu among the “mainstream” pollsters, among whom it only passed 61 once of the last ten polls.
Looking at the campaign as a whole, we have seen a gradual strengthening of the Netanyahu bloc, from 58.8 seats to 60.3, while the current government has remained steady.
In terms of parties, the two big “losers” so far have been Yamina/Jewish Home, which has fallen from 4.4 seats in June to zero today, and Likud, which has lost almost a seat a month throughout the campaign.
In contrast, Yesh Atid and Religious Zionism have each made strong gains of four to five seats throughout the campaign, enabling Yesh Atid to close the gap on Likud from almost 15 seats to six, and for Religious Zionism to solidify itself as the third-biggest party.
There will of course be plenty of time for analysis of what has happened throughout the campaign – and the trends that dominated it. Instead, with this article, we will look forward to what might happen in the final days.
How much should we read into the final polls?
In assessing the final polling, it is important to begin with a key methodological point. As stated above, the final polls were conducted on Thursday, or at the latest Friday morning — a full four days before voting begins. That leaves a lot of time for late shifts, and as we have noted frequently, polls are snapshots in time rather than predictions of the future.
The final polling, therefore, reflects the situation a few days before the election, and not necessarily the situation on Election Day itself.
Therefore when we analyze the predictive quality of the final polling, we are really assessing how much things historically change in the final days, rather than the quality of the polling itself. A subtle, but important, nuance.
Looking at the past four elections, we can see that – on the party level – things tend to change quite a lot in the final days. In the first election of this cycle, in April 2019, on average, parties ended up 3 seats away from their polling. That means a party – again, on average – polling at 8 seats ended up either five or 11, a massive difference. This, however, was heavily influenced by two parties almost, but not quite, crossing the threshold, which changed things around a lot.
In the three elections since then, things settled down a lot, with a much less eventful final few days, and an average late movement of around just 1.1 seats.
The takeaway here is that we can expect fairly significant late changes to the various parties’ seat totals in the final days. As we have noted previously, historically when elections are framed as head-to-heads between two large parties, this late movement has been away from the smaller to the larger parties in the bloc. On the other hand, when the elections have been framed as a battle of competing coalitions, the movement has been reversed.
This election fits somewhere in the middle, so on a party level, there is indeed much uncertainty, even at this late stage.
What will determine the election, however, is not the intra-bloc makeup, but rather the balance between the blocs themselves.
And here the late changes are, historically, much less pronounced.
On a bloc level, over the past two elections there has been almost no change from the final polling to the eventual results. Going back to 2019, there were two to three seats’ worth of bloc shifting in the final days, but much of this can again be explained by parties missing the threshold. Taken as a whole, the average shift in the past four elections is a fairly significant 1.8 seats. In today’s context, that means the Netanyahu bloc getting either 62 seats and being able to quite comfortably form a government, or alternatively getting 59 and falling significantly short.
These aren’t big differences in percentage terms, but when things are so close, they would be decisive.
One could look at these numbers and see that in three of the past four elections, the late shift has been towards the anti-Bibi bloc, and from this draw the conclusion that the latter scenario is more likely. However, with such a small sample size we would be wary of such conclusions. Furthermore, with four parties on the other side close to the threshold, if anything the smart money would be on any late shifts going the other way.
What could change things in the final few days?
With bloc switching by voters at this late stage almost nonexistent, and intra-bloc shifts largely insignificant to the outcome, the election will likely come down to two main factors:
The first is differential turnout, particularly in the Arab sector. As we noted last week, according to multiple polls, predicted Arab turnout has steadily increased in recent weeks, from as low as 42 percent to between 46 and 51 percent (compared with 45 percent in the last election). If these numbers continue to increase, the likelihood of Netanyahu being able to form a government will decrease significantly.
At the same time, Netanyahu himself is playing the turnout game, counting on, in his words, hundreds of thousands of Likud voters who stayed at home last time to vote this time. If he is successful in this effort, we could see some movement the other way.
The second – and most significant – factor at this late stage is the 3.25 percent threshold, an issue we have returned to time and again. There are currently two Arab parties (Ra’am and Hadash-Ta’al) and two parties from the left (Labor and Meretz) polling at four or five seats, dangerously close to the threshold. For the Arab parties, the equation is straightforward. As long as the Arab population goes to vote in the current numbers – or more – they will in all likelihood be safe.
But when it comes to Labor and Meretz, the situation is more fluid, with a large pool of tactical voters on the center-left who are prepared to shift their vote at the last minute if needed. This creates an interesting dynamic between the two parties and Yesh Atid.
On the one hand, both parties have passed the threshold in every poll taken since mid-July, and according to Prime Minister and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, are therefore in no danger of not making the cut. Concerned about canceling out the impressive gains his party has made over the past few months, Lapid is urging people not to vote tactically to “save” Labor and Meretz.
At the same time, the two parties are clearly spooked by some of the recent polling which in many cases has shown them losing seats to Yesh Atid, pushing them dangerously close to the threshold. Their fear is that in a bid to help Yesh Atid to become the largest party, a decisive chunk of their remaining voters could actually move over to Lapid at the last minute, sealing their fate.
Their hope is that “muscle memory” kicks in from the past elections, and Yesh Atid voters actually do end up voting tactically to “save” them. However, the fact that this happened last time doesn’t necessarily mean it will this time. Either way, it’s definitely something to watch.
When talking about the threshold, it is also worth mentioning Jewish Home and Balad. Neither of these parties has crossed the threshold in a single poll, but both averaged around two percent over the past week, showing some signs that they could potentially cross it.
Were Ayelet Shaked’s Jewish Home to cross the threshold, it would in all likelihood mean that Netanyahu’s bloc reaches at least 61. In contrast, were Balad – buoyed by increased Arab turnout – to cross, it would almost certainly mean that Netanyahu falls short (unless Balad crossing the threshold sends another Arab party underneath). This, however, would also harm the other bloc’s chances of forming a government, as there is virtually no chance of Balad – the most extreme Arab nationalist party – being invited, or agreeing, to join the next government.
In the end, if there are no surprises with regard to the threshold (i.e., Labor, Meretz, Ra’am and Hadash-Ta’al all make it, and Balad and Jewish Home do not), these elections will likely come down to a seat or two, with the Netanyahu bloc at 59, 60 or 61 seats. But if something at the bottom changes, he could end up with a relatively comfortable victory.
After four months of constant polling, for the next few days we are flying blind. Now it’s time for the voters to have their say.
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* Full disclosure: The authors of this piece have recently conducted polling on behalf of Meretz.
Simon Davies and Joshua Hantman are partners at Number 10 Strategies, an international strategic, research and communications consultancy, who have polled and run campaigns for presidents, prime ministers, political parties and major corporations across dozens of countries in four continents.
