Method
Slightly ahead, on the same seats
The page now says the Netanyahu bloc is slightly ahead, with about 55 seats, the opposition bloc with 53 and the Arab parties with 12 — the seats it showed on 3 October. What changed is a probability: the Netanyahu bloc's chance of coming out the larger went from 59.8% to 61.8%, past the 60% at which the headline changes its word. One poll did most of it.
The top of the forecast page now reads Netanyahu bloc is slightly ahead with about 55 seats, Opposition bloc with 53, and Arab parties with 12. On 3 October it read Netanyahu bloc and Opposition bloc are close, at about 55 and 53 seats, and Arab parties with 12. The seats are the same. The word is not.
How the word is chosen
The seats in the headline come from the table on the forecast page. The word in front of them comes from the simulations: the share of simulated elections in which each bloc ends up the larger of the two, counting a tie as half to each. Below 60% the page calls the blocs close, or level when their seats are equal. At 60% it says the bloc in front is slightly ahead, at 75% that it leads, and at 90% that it clearly leads.
Today the Netanyahu bloc is the larger in 58.7% of simulations, the opposition bloc in 35.1%, and the two tie in 6.2%. Counting each tie as half, that is 61.8%, from 59.8% on 3 October.
So the word changed on a move of two points, across a line this site drew. 59.8% and 61.8% describe nearly the same race. What the change does say is which way the race moved.
What moved it
Two polls are new since 3 October:
- Channel 14 (Filber), fielded 1 October, 2,175 respondents: 64 seats for the Netanyahu bloc, 44 for the opposition and 12 for the Arab parties
- Kan 11 (Kantar), fielded 4 October: 51, 52 and 13, plus 4 for The Reservists-New Economic Party, which is in neither bloc
Both match what their outlets reported when they were published.
Channel 14’s poll is the one that moved the word. Added on its own, it would have taken the Netanyahu bloc’s figure to about 63%. Kan 11’s poll, and two more days gone by, brought it back to 61.8%.
Every Channel 14 poll counts at half weight here. This one carries 2.6% of the weight in today’s average, about half of what i24 News’s poll of the same day carries. A sample four times the usual size does not earn it more.
What did not move
The seats: 55 for the Netanyahu bloc, 53 for the opposition and 12 for the Arab parties, as on 3 October. Inside the Netanyahu bloc, Shas goes from 9 to 8 and United Torah Judaism from 7 to 8.
Neither bloc is near a majority. The Netanyahu bloc reaches 61 seats in 3.8% of simulations, from 3.3%, and the opposition in 1.8%, as before. The opposition bloc and the Arab parties reach 61 between them in 82.4%, from 80.4%. That is arithmetic about seats and nothing more: those seats belong to lists that do not act as one, and no coalition is modelled here.
Amcha Israel, below the threshold twice
Amcha Israel, Ofer Winter’s list, was below the threshold in both new polls: 1.7% in Channel 14’s and 2.6% in Kan 11’s. Kantar had given it 4 seats in each of its five earlier polls for Kan 11. Channel 14 has had it below the threshold in every poll since 3 September.
Its chance of winning seats fell from 75 in 100 to 68. That is still better than even, so the table keeps its 4 seats, in the Netanyahu bloc.
The rest
Yashar wins more seats than Likud in 47.5% of simulations, Likud more than Yashar in 43.4%, and they tie in 9.1%.
One correction, of ours. On 3 October this site recorded a vote share of 4.3% for five lists in i24 News’s poll of 1 October. That was the poll’s margin of error, read from a note that listed it before the one share the note gave. No figure on this site uses a share below the threshold, so nothing here moved, and a note like that is now read as giving no share at all.