Channel 14 on Thursday night released the first Direct Polls survey since the start of the war, showing Benny Gantz and his National Unity Party with 28 mandates (currently only 12), if elections were held this week. Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party are right behind him, with 27 mandates (currently 32).
Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid lags in third place with only 14 mandates (currently 24); Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beiteinu with 11 (6); Aryeh Deri’s Shas with 10 (11); Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit with 8 (6); United Torah Judaism with 7 (7); Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am with 6 (5); Ayman Odeh’s Hadash-Ta’al with 5 (5); and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism with 4 (7).
On Monday, News12 published a public opinion poll that was devastating to Israel’s right and Netanyahu’s coalition: Benny Gantz took 37 mandates, compared to Netanyahu’s 18, and Yair Lapid’s 15. The worst hit was Smotrich’s Religious Zionism which sank well below the 3.25% threshold vote.
Among many other differences between the two polls was the fact that News12 gave the extreme-left Meretz 5 mandates while Direct Polls gave it none. At the same time, both polls showed the Labor Party still well below the 3.25% threshold vote.
On its face, the right-wing bloc has 56 mandates, compared to the left-wing block’s 54, and the two Arab parties with 10. However, it should be noted that the “left-wing bloc” includes former Likud members in Gantz’s party (Gideon Sa’ar, Ze’ev Elkin) who may be thinking of returning home or running independently in a right-identified slate; and Israel Beitenu who could enter a coalition with Likud at the peak of its political strength.
MK Oded Forer, number 2 in Israel Beitenu, in an appearance on Channel 14’s The Patriots Thursday night, was extremely critical of the way Netanyahu’s war cabinet was squandering the potential advantage of providing humanitarian aid directly from an IDF compound to the Gazan population, and instead letting Hamas control the aid and use it to boost its position. Nevertheless, Forer, who served as Agriculture Minister in the Lapid-Bennett government, was not opposed to joining a Likud-led government. My wishful thinking? Possibly. But I can’t imagine Avigdor Liberman’s party, or for that matter Sa’ar and Elkin, supporting Prime Minister Benny Gantz’s push for a Palestinian State in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.
So, we may be looking at a right-wing coalition bloc that’s well above 60 mandates, if all the nice right-wingers can play nice together.
RUNNING WITH THE HYPOTHETICALS
The Direct Polls survey also asked respondents how they would vote should three hypothetical new parties were also running: one “soft right” party headed by former PM Naftali Bennett; one “centrist” party headed by former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen; and one leftist party that would include leaders of the protest movement, possibly headed by former IDF deputy-chief of staff who lost his bid to lead Meretz, Yair Golan.
In such a hypothetical election, Likud would come out ahead with 22 mandates; and Gantz behind it with only 17 mandates.
A united leftist party, which includes Labor, Meretz and the protest organizations, would receive 14 mandates; Naftali Bennett 10; Shas 9; Yossi Cohen 8; Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid crashes, getting only 7 mandates; UTJ keeps its 7 mandates; Israel Beitenu and Otzma Yehudit each with 6 mandates; Ra’am and Hadash-Ta’al each with 5 mandates; and Smotrich gets 4 mandates.
These results prove what I’ve been saying for some time about Benny Gantz’s amazing soaring in the polls: center-right respondents don’t vote for Gantz, they only park their votes on his lot until something better comes along. Also, about Naftali Bennett collecting 10 mandates, presumably from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism – Naftali Bennett always scores astonishingly high in the polls, only to end up barely crossing the vote threshold, and sometimes not even that.
Finally: I like the Direct Polls better than the News12 survey because the former is simply more reliable:
The poll was done over the phone and Internet. It was based on a small sample group of 504 respondents from “a representative model of the entire population of Israel aged 18 and over,” and the maximum sampling error was +-4.4%, which is on the high side.
The Direct Polls survey relied on 1,487 adults (18+) who are a representative sample of the general population in Israel. Their statistical sampling error was ± 3.9%, at a 95% probability.
