Update, October 30: A reader pushed back on X, and he was partly right. See where the votes went below.
Our forecast said Netanyahu’s camp would win 53 seats. It won 53 seats. You’d think I’d be busy taking a victory lap. Instead I’ve spent two days reading people explain what those 53 seats “mean,” and most of them are full of it.
The Likud version goes like this: Likud got more votes than last time, Likud is the biggest party by a mile, and if it weren’t for the Arabs (and maybe Qatar) Bibi would have 61. The anti-Bibi version goes: the country rejected him, the end. Both versions are a little bit true and mostly lazy.
The best take I’ve seen so far came from Israeli journalist and political analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, in a long post on X. Read it first, then we’ll go through it:
This is an important thing to clarify. True, Netanyahu won a very small increase in absolute numbers of votes, but he lost ground by every other metric. He lost not only to the high Arab turnout, he also lost vote share among Jews. Walk with me for a moment through the numbers. And don’t believe the partisans. His supporters will tell you he beat out the Channel 12 polling, which is true. But he also fell far short of Channel 14’s polling. The bottom line isn’t whether the polls were good (they were not), but in what happened at the actual ballot box. Now that the votes are counted, here’s what happened. From 2022 to 2026, the total eligible-voter population grew by about 8% as just over 600,000 young Israelis turned 18. And that new cohort leans right and religious — i.e., heavily in Netanyahu’s favor. So his "natural" expected growth is probably higher than that. But Likud’s actual vote total grew by just 4.67%. And some of that was cannibalizing Shas and Otzma, to the frustration of both parties. Netanyahu’s bloc as a whole only rose about 3.9%. Did those young voters stay home? We don’t know yet. The age breakdown hasn’t been published. But the soldiers’ turnout — most of them young — was about 80%, higher even than the amazingly high average turnout. It’s possible that young Haredi voters stayed home, but this wouldn’t explain Likud itself falling behind. And United Torah Judaism’s vote total grew by almost 12%, suggesting a high young-Haredi turnout. Were the losses caused by natural deaths of older Likudniks? Also no. Only about 200,000 people died between the elections, and their age group leans left-ward compared to the general population. The effect was far too little to explain the real-vote gap, and should have favored Netanyahu in vote share. The same goes for emigration/vote tourism. Probably at least three times as many Israelis left the country since 2022 than could possibly have returned briefly to vote on Election Day (that’s an educated guess; I can’t find hard numbers). And that emigration was composed of a higher share of opposition voters. This phenomenon should also have favored Netanyahu’s bloc in the vote share. Nor was Likud’s decline just a function of Arab turnout, as the real vote numbers show. If you remove Arab-party votes from the total for the past two elections, the Netanyahu bloc’s share falls from 54.2% in the 2022 election to 49.4% on Tuesday. That’s a decline in the non-Arab vote share, where he only wins about 59 seats. In other words, even though his camp almost certainly benefited from a young demographic surge, from natural deaths that shrank the opposition, and from three years of relatively high emigration of opposition voters — Netanyahu still fell behind in overall vote share even among Jews. That’s not enough to "lose" an Israeli election because of how Israel’s electoral system works — and because of how poorly the opposition managed its campaign over the past four years. But there’s no way to spin those numbers as a rallying behind Netanyahu. He lost significant ground among veteran right-wing Jewish voters.
— Haviv Rettig Gur (@havivrettiggur) October 30, 2026
In plain English, Haviv’s argument is this. The number of eligible voters grew by about 8% since 2022, and the new 18-year-olds lean right and religious. So Netanyahu’s camp should have grown by at least 8% just by standing still. Instead Likud grew by under 5% and the whole camp by under 4%. Old voters dying and opposition voters emigrating should have helped Bibi too. And if you throw out the Arab parties’ votes entirely, Netanyahu’s camp still fell from 54.2% of the remaining vote in 2022 to 49.4% this week. His conclusion: there’s “no way to spin those numbers as a rallying behind Netanyahu.”
He’s mostly right. He’s also wrong in a few places that matter, and his last line claims more than his numbers can prove. But it’s a post with a lot of numbers in it, and a lot of numbers is how readers get lost. So first, the cast of characters.
Who’s who
Israelis don’t vote for a prime minister. They vote for a party, and parties then try to stitch together 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. Everyone talks about “the bloc,” but there are three of them, so in this post I’m going to name them every single time:
- The Bibi Bloc: the five parties of Netanyahu’s outgoing coalition camp. Likud, Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, Smotrich’s Religious Zionism (merged this time with Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut), and the two Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ).
- The Eisenkot Bloc: the four Jewish-led opposition parties. Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar, Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad (Bennett plus Lapid), Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, and Yair Golan’s Democrats.
- The Arab parties: the Joint List (Hadash, Balad and Ta’al running together) and Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am. They aren’t really a bloc. They’re just the parties neither of the other two blocs will admit to wanting.
Here’s the final seat count, with all votes counted:
| Bloc | Party | Seats |
|---|---|---|
| Bibi Bloc: 53 | Likud | 27 |
| Otzma Yehudit | 7 | |
| United Torah Judaism | 7 | |
| Shas | 6 | |
| Religious Zionism-Zehut | 6 | |
| Eisenkot Bloc: 48 | Yashar | 21 |
| B’Yachad | 12 | |
| The Democrats | 8 | |
| Yisrael Beytenu | 7 | |
| Arab parties: 19 | Joint List | 11 |
| Ra’am | 8 |
A correction to our last post. When we graded our forecast Wednesday night, with 97.63% counted, we had the Joint List at 12 and Ra’am at 7. Once the roughly 392,000 “double envelope” ballots were counted (soldiers, diplomats, hospital staff, prisoners and anyone else who voted away from their home polling station), one seat moved from the Joint List to Ra’am. The final count is Joint List 11, Ra’am 8. The Arab parties’ total is still 19, the most ever, and nothing else changed. Official certified results come out next Wednesday, November 4.
Checking Haviv’s math
I pulled the party vote totals from the Central Elections Committee count as of Thursday evening, with essentially 100% counted, and put them next to the official 2022 results. Here’s the Bibi Bloc, party by party:
| Bibi Bloc party | 2022 votes | 2026 votes | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Likud | 1,115,336 | 1,164,494 | +4.4% |
| Otzma Yehudit + Religious Zionism* | 516,470 | 614,831 | +19.0% |
| Shas | 392,964 | 298,881 | -23.9% |
| United Torah Judaism | 280,194 | 312,241 | +11.4% |
| Bibi Bloc total | 2,304,964 | 2,390,447 | +3.7% |
*In 2022, Ben Gvir and Smotrich ran together on one list. This time they ran separately (Otzma got 325,650 votes, Religious Zionism-Zehut got 289,181), so I’ve added them together to compare apples to apples.
Haviv has Likud at +4.67% and the Bibi Bloc at +3.9%. I get +4.4% and +3.7%. The gap is a few tenths of a percent, almost certainly because we grabbed the count at slightly different moments. It doesn’t change anything. UTJ “almost 12%”? I get 11.4%. Close enough.
Now the bigger picture. These are the numbers that actually tell the story:
| 2022 | 2026 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eligible voters | 6,788,804 | 7,337,000 | +8.1% |
| Votes cast | 4,794,593 | 5,716,665 | +19.2% |
| Turnout | 70.6% | 77.9% | +7.3 points |
| Arab party votes | 511,399 | 836,153 | +63.5% |
| All other valid votes | 4,253,343 | about 4,841,500 | +13.8% |
| Bibi Bloc votes | 2,304,964 | 2,390,447 | +3.7% |
Sources for the 2026 totals: eligible voters, votes cast and invalid ballots (about 25,000 were thrown out). The 2026 “all other valid votes” figure is rounded because the final certified count isn’t out yet.
Haviv is right, and he actually undersold it. He measured the Bibi Bloc against the 8% growth in eligible voters. The better yardstick is how many people actually showed up, and that grew by 19%. Over 900,000 more ballots were cast than in 2022. The Bibi Bloc picked up about 85,000 of them.
Put that as a share of the vote and it’s ugly for Bibi:
| Bibi Bloc’s share of… | 2022 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| All valid votes | 48.4% | 42.1% |
| Valid votes, not counting Arab parties | 54.2% | 49.4% |
That second line matches Haviv’s 49.4% exactly. Here’s the same thing in plain words: about 588,000 more people voted for non-Arab parties this year than in 2022. The Bibi Bloc got roughly one in seven of those new votes. Everyone else outside the Arab parties grew by 26%. Where exactly those votes went turns out to matter, and I get into it in the update below.
So if your takeaway from Tuesday is “Likud got more votes than last time, so the people have spoken,” congratulations, you’ve discovered that populations grow. A party whose vote grows slower than the population is shrinking. That’s not left-wing math. It’s division.
Where Haviv goes too far
“Not Arab” doesn’t mean “Jewish.” When Haviv throws out the Arab parties and says Bibi lost ground even among Jews, he’s treating everyone who didn’t vote for an Arab party as Jewish. They aren’t. Plenty of Arab and Druze citizens vote for Likud, Yashar, the Democrats and other Jewish-led parties. Arab turnout jumped from about 53% in 2022 to about 80% this time, so more of those voters ended up in his “Jewish” pool. My rough estimate is that this shaves maybe a point off his decline. It weakens his “even among Jews” point without killing it.
His last line doesn’t follow from his numbers. Haviv ends by saying Netanyahu lost a lot of support among longtime right-wing Jewish voters. Party vote totals can’t tell you that. They can’t tell two very different stories apart:
- Right-wingers who voted Bibi in 2022 switched to someone else.
- Bibi’s 2022 voters all came back, and a few hundred thousand people who skipped 2022 showed up this time and voted against him.
Haviv’s line is the first story. The numbers fit the second one just as well, maybe better: Jewish turnout went up too (by my rough estimate, a few points), and the Bibi Bloc’s raw vote went up, not down. To find out which one happened, you need surveys that ask people how they voted both times, or a polling-station-by-polling-station breakdown. Those take weeks. Until then, anyone who tells you confidently which story is true is guessing.
“Right-wing” and “Bibi Bloc” aren’t the same thing. Bennett is right-wing. Liberman is right-wing. Their parties won 19 seats between them, and both men campaigned on getting rid of Netanyahu. If some Likud voters moved to Bennett, they didn’t move left. They moved away from Bibi. That still supports Haviv’s real point (nobody rallied behind Netanyahu), but it’s a rejection of a man, not of the right.
And the hard right grew. Haviv says Likud’s gains came partly from eating Shas and Otzma. Shas, sure: it lost about 94,000 votes and finished with 6 seats, its worst result in 34 years. But Otzma and Religious Zionism together gained about 98,000 votes, up 19% from their joint 2022 list. That’s the fastest growth of anything in the Bibi Bloc.
So to the Ben Gvir and Smotrich fans: congratulations, your guys grew. It still wasn’t enough, and the coalition math you’re about to read gets worse for you, not better.
Some of the demographic arguments are shaky.
- A real share of each year’s new 18-year-olds is Arab, and this year a lot of them voted for Arab parties. So “the new voters should have pushed Bibi above 8%” overstates it.
- Soldiers voted at about 80%, but soldiers don’t represent all young voters. They leave out young Haredim and young Arabs, which are exactly the groups the argument is about.
- The 8% growth in eligible voters already has deaths subtracted. Counting deaths again as a separate point double-counts them.
- Israelis who move abroad usually stay on the voter rolls, and Israel has no absentee voting for ordinary citizens. So the 8% includes people who can’t vote. That slightly weakens Haviv’s yardstick, though he’s right that emigration should still have hurt the opposition’s raw totals more than Bibi’s.
He leaves out that 2022 was a lucky year for Bibi. In 2022 the Bibi Bloc got 48.4% of the vote and turned it into 64 seats. How? Votes for parties that fall below the 3.25% threshold are thrown away, and in 2022 two anti-Bibi parties just missed it: Meretz (150,696 votes) and Balad (138,617). That’s almost 290,000 opposition votes in the garbage. So part of the drop from 64 seats to 53 isn’t lost support. It’s the luck running out. This time the wasted votes were more balanced: Yoaz Hendel’s Reservists threw away 154,585 opposition-leaning votes, and Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael, which pledged to back only Netanyahu, threw away 95,288.
And in fairness to Bibi. Likud is the biggest party by about 250,000 votes over Yashar. The Bibi Bloc got about 246,000 more votes than the Eisenkot Bloc. Both of those are true, and Netanyahu’s supporters are allowed to say so. Neither of them is 61.
Update: where did the votes go?
A reader on X pushed back on this post, and part of his pushback is right. I showed that the Bibi Bloc lost share. I didn’t show who picked it up. Here’s the answer, and it isn’t the one the anti-Bibi side wants to hear.
About 913,000 more valid votes were cast this year than in 2022. Here’s where they went:
| Where the extra votes went | Added votes | Share of the extra votes |
|---|---|---|
| Bibi Bloc | +85,483 | 9.4% |
| Eisenkot’s parties* | +324,328 | 35.5% |
| Arab parties | +324,754 | 35.6% |
| Lists that missed the threshold, plus tiny lists | +178,382 | 19.5% |
| Total | +912,947 | 100% |
*For 2022 I counted Yesh Atid, National Unity, Yisrael Beytenu, Labor and Meretz, the Jewish-led opposition of that election and the closest match to today’s Eisenkot Bloc. One wrinkle: Gideon Sa’ar ran with National Unity in 2022 and is on Likud’s list this time.
So Eisenkot’s parties grew by about 18%, almost exactly as fast as the number of people voting (19%). The Bibi Bloc grew by under 4%. The Arab parties grew by 64%, and the lists that missed the threshold more than doubled. As shares of the whole vote:
| Share of all valid votes | 2022 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bibi Bloc | 48.4% | 42.1% | -6.3 points |
| Eisenkot’s parties* | 38.2% | 37.8% | -0.4 points |
| Arab parties | 10.7% | 14.7% | +4.0 points |
| Lists that missed the threshold, plus tiny lists | 2.7% | 5.4% | +2.7 points |
In plain words: the Eisenkot Bloc’s share of the vote barely moved. The 6.3 points the Bibi Bloc lost went to the Arab parties (4 points) and to parties that didn’t make it into the Knesset at all (2.7 points). Even if you leave the Arab parties out, Eisenkot’s parties went from 42.8% to 44.3% of the rest of the vote, picking up only about 1.5 of the nearly 5 points the Bibi Bloc lost. The other 3.3 points went to lists that missed the threshold.
He also argues that Ofer Winter’s voters were Bibi voters in all but name, since Winter pledged to back only Netanyahu, and that about half of Hendel’s Reservists were too. Fair enough, so let’s count them. The Bibi Bloc plus Winter plus half the Reservists comes to 52.9% of non-Arab-party votes. In 2022 the Bibi Bloc alone had 54.2%, or 55.5% if you also count Ayelet Shaked’s Jewish Home, which missed the threshold that year, as Bibi-aligned. Counted his way, the drop is somewhere between 1.3 and 2.6 points instead of the 4.8 in the main post. It’s smaller, but it’s still a drop.
What this changes: nobody rallied behind Netanyahu, and nobody rallied behind Eisenkot either. Eisenkot’s parties kept pace with turnout and that’s it. The real movers were Arab turnout and votes for right-leaning lists like Winter’s and Hendel’s, which more than doubled and then counted for nothing because both lists missed the threshold. That’s bad news for Bibi, not much better news for Eisenkot, and it goes a long way toward explaining the deadlock everyone is now stuck in.
“But the Arabs stole it”
Wednesday morning, Netanyahu posted on X that the election was “stolen by Arab parties” and demanded the police and Shin Bet investigate. On Election Day itself, Ben Gvir was urging his voters to rush to the polls because Arab turnout was soaring. Telling your voters to vote because other people are voting is called campaigning. When the Arab parties do it, it’s also called campaigning.
Here’s what’s actually established, according to Calcalist’s roundup:
- Police arrested at least six suspects in the Negev on suspicion of buying votes for Ra’am. That’s a real case and should be prosecuted if it holds up. Abbas denies any connection and says Ra’am will cooperate.
- Police said they had no investigative or intelligence basis for Likud’s claims of systematic tampering.
- Elections Committee chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg asked Shin Bet chief David Zini to investigate suspected foreign funding and vote buying, reportedly by Qatar, aimed at boosting Arab turnout. Qatar denies it. The investigation isn’t finished. The Shin Bet itself said the probe is narrow, doesn’t accuse an entire community that voted legally, and that only people who broke the law will be dealt with.
If Qatar spent money to get people to the polls, that’s a serious scandal and I want to know everything. But even if every Arab vote in the country had been bought, which nobody is claiming, the people who cast them are citizens, and turnout isn’t a crime. Soldiers voted at about 80% too. Nobody thinks the IDF stole the election.
Now do the math the Likud people are doing quietly in their heads. I ran the seat allocation again under two “what if” scenarios. Treat these as rough: they ignore the surplus-vote deals between parties, so they can be off by a seat.
- If Arab turnout had stayed at 2022 levels: the Bibi Bloc gets about 57 seats. Still short of 61.
- If Arab citizens hadn’t voted at all: the Bibi Bloc gets about 62.
(By the way, that second scenario is why Haviv’s “about 59 seats” line is a bit off. 49.4% of 120 is 59, but once you throw out the votes wasted on parties under the threshold, the Bibi Bloc’s share of the votes that count is closer to 53%.)
So yes, the Arab turnout surge probably cost Bibi three or four seats compared to 2022. And Bibi was short of a majority even without it. The only version of this election that Netanyahu wins outright is the one where a fifth of the country’s citizens stay home. If that’s your plan for winning, you don’t have a plan. You have a wish.
So what happens now?
Here’s the calendar. Official results are published November 4, and that’s also when parties formally tell President Isaac Herzog who they recommend for prime minister. The new Knesset is sworn in November 10. Herzog then has about two weeks to hand someone the first shot at forming a government, according to the timeline N12 published. Parties have until November 18 to challenge the results. Herzog has already said everything should be done to avoid another election and that everyone should come in with an open mind. Good luck with that.
Here are the real options, with the seat math.
1. Netanyahu finds eight more seats. The Bibi Bloc has 53. The obvious eight are Liberman’s 7 plus one more, and Liberman’s line since the election is “We won’t sit with Bibi or with Tibi” (meaning Ahmad Tibi, as a stand-in for the Arab parties). Bennett has said he won’t sit with Netanyahu in any form. According to N12’s Daphna Liel, Netanyahu’s plan has three steps: make leaning on Arab parties politically toxic, try to pry someone loose from the Eisenkot Bloc (Bennett first), and if that fails, go back to elections.
2. A unity government with Eisenkot. Likud plus Yashar is 48. Netanyahu’s allies are floating a version with Likud, Yashar, Otzma and Religious Zionism, which adds up to exactly 61. The idea: pass a law drafting Haredim into the army while the Haredi parties sit outside the government, so their rabbis don’t have to own it, then bring them back in afterward. Eisenkot has said he won’t serve under Netanyahu, “not even in a rotation.” Liberman, though, has reportedly cut contact with his opposition partners and wants exactly this kind of Eisenkot-Netanyahu government.
Ben Gvir and Smotrich voters, please sit with that one for a minute. One of the more realistic ways your guys stay in government is by voting for a Haredi draft law alongside Gadi Eisenkot.
3. UTJ props up Eisenkot. This is the strangest story of the week. According to ynet and N12, people inside UTJ are floating a deal: UTJ stays out of an Eisenkot government but abstains instead of voting against it. In return they want a law exempting yeshiva students from the draft. One UTJ source told N12 their alliance with Netanyahu “has run its course.” That echoes a May letter from Rabbi Dov Landau, the leading rabbi of the Lithuanian Haredi world, saying they no longer trust the prime minister. UTJ chairman Yaakov Asher has publicly denied any talks, and there’s a report that UTJ won’t recommend anyone to Herzog at all.
The math: if UTJ’s 7 abstain, the Bibi Bloc can muster 46 votes against an Eisenkot government that has 48. On paper that works. In real life it doesn’t, for three reasons. First, the price is a draft exemption, and Eisenkot made military or national service for everyone one of his four conditions for any partner. Every party in the Eisenkot Bloc ran on ending the exemption. Second, Liberman refuses to rely on the Haredim and refuses to join minority governments, and without his 7 Eisenkot has 41. Third, Bibi isn’t going to sit quietly while his old partners hand his job to Eisenkot.
Still, even if the deal goes nowhere, it tells you something real: the Haredi alliance with Netanyahu, which held through five elections, is cracking. That’s the most important long-term story out of this election, and almost nobody outside the Hebrew press is covering it.
4. Eisenkot plus the Arab parties. Eisenkot Bloc 48 plus Arab parties 19 is 67, a comfortable majority. Eisenkot, Bennett and Liberman all ruled it out during the campaign. Golan is the only one pushing for it, and he met with Abbas on Thursday. There were protesters outside Eisenkot’s house in Herzliya on Thursday demanding he do it. The softer version, a minority government that Ra’am supports from outside, is the 2021 Bennett-Lapid model. Abbas himself says the chance of that is “slim to nonexistent.”
5. Shas flips. We gave this about 1 in 50 on Wednesday and I’m not raising it. Aryeh Deri called Eisenkot a “big disappointment” back in March and said he’s no longer a partner. Bennett has said Deri can’t sit in one more Israeli government. And Shas just had its worst night in 34 years after running an ad in which a soldier home for Shabbat thanks his yeshiva-student brother for learning Torah. I’m not saying those two things are related. I’m not not saying it.
6. Another election. It would be the seventh since 2019.
Our read
This is a judgment call, not a model output.
Most likely: weeks of nothing. Netanyahu stays on as caretaker prime minister, which costs him nothing. Herzog, Liberman and a big chunk of the press lean on Eisenkot to join some kind of unity government, and the fight becomes about who sits at the top and in what order. A unity deal or a new election are the two places this probably ends up, and right now I’d call it close to a coin flip between them.
Possible but hard: an Eisenkot government that survives on abstentions from UTJ or Ra’am. Every version of it requires at least two party leaders to break a promise they made loudly and recently.
Long shot: the Bibi Bloc gets to 61 with defectors.
Which brings us back to Haviv. He’s right that nobody rallied behind Netanyahu. He’s right that the “it was just the Arabs” excuse doesn’t survive the numbers. Where I’d push back is on the story of right-wing voters abandoning Bibi. What the numbers show for sure is that the people who decided to vote this time broke hard against him, though not toward Eisenkot in particular. Whether his own voters left him is still an open question.
For Bibi fans, that’s both the good news and the bad news. The good news is your base may still be there. The bad news is that a whole lot of people who stayed home in 2022 made a point of showing up this time, and fewer than one in ten of them voted for you.
And Eisenkot fans, before you get smug: they didn’t flock to you either. Your parties grew about as fast as turnout and no faster. That’s not a mandate. That’s keeping pace.
We’ll update the numbers when the official results come out November 4.
― Tom Robbins
