In the end, the tie was broken. For months, the political system never stopped its frustrated discussion of "the damn draw," and pollsters were so bored they were plucking out their hair. But in the final stretch, the tie dissolved – or was smashed. It's hard to identify the precise moment it happened.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
It's more likely that it was the result of a cluster of events: In the past few weeks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used all the ammunition and tools at his disposal, hoping that something would work. He trash talked Blue and White leader Benny Gantz; he instituted, supposedly, the "cannabis revolution"; he made a gesture to the Druze by talking about "terrible remarks" top Blue and White official Gabi Ashkenazi made about the sector in transcripts from the Harpaz affair; he even played up to the Ethiopian-Israeli community, visiting their homes and eating their cooking, and he even brought Gadi Yevarkan, an Ethiopian Israeli from Blue and White, back "home" to Likud; and finally, opened the gates to Ethiopian aliyah that had been shut for years.
Netanyahu also relaxed construction freezes in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria that had been in place for 10 years or more. US President Donald Trump's "deal of the century," which was unveiled at the end of January, provided the first hints that something was happening behind the political "tie" and unchanging polls. After a long-term stall and intense focus on the question of "Yes" or "No" to Netanyahu as prime minister, there was finally talk about a real issue. The Likud and Netanyahu were portrayed as the ones who were spearheading a coherent position, and especially as the ones who would soon be applying Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the Jewish settlements. Blue and White came off as a flip-flop party.
But it appears that Netanyahu's heaviest artillery was math. The prime minister managed to convince large sectors of the public that Gantz could not form a government without the Joint Arab List either lending him their support or abstaining when he tries to swear in a government in a confidence vote.
Many members of the Joint Arab List have been caught making statements praising terrorism and rejecting the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. Blue and White found it difficult to counter this mathematical and ideological fact. Blue and White members were asked about it hundreds of times and fumbled their answers. Generally, they could only say they "believed" or "hoped" that the election results would allow for an alternative government.
The straw that broke the camel's back was a recording made public last week in which Yisrael Bachar, Gantz's top adviser, describes him as weak and cowardly. Bachar's remarks came on the heels of the revived Fifth Dimension scandal involving Gantz's business affairs, which in the previous election harmed his image as the Ashkenazi poster boy who is Teflon when it comes to dirty tricks and corruption.
Gantz himself added to the embarrassment through a series of awkward and sometimes confused statements, choosing the wrong words and getting names wrong and embarrassing himself in front of everyone watching and listening.
The genie is out of the bottle
Netanyahu was the conductor in this well-orchestrated symphony, which was nothing less than Campaigning 101. The campaign was an emotional one that intensified and became more polarized the closer we got to Election Day. The "Anyone but Bibi" folks, whose zealotry sometimes made them seem like cult leaders, gave the opposing camp a new identity, and helped build it up.
In the last few weeks of the election, Netanyahu took on the persona of one who is persecuted – politically, personally, and tribally – and has become the victim of selective law enforcement that aimed to force out of office the person whom most of the people wanted to see as leader.
All of a sudden, the genie was out of the bottle and terms like "the first Israel" and "the second Israel" and forgotten inter-ethnic battles were dredged up. Netanyahu worked the field with that narrative and his other arguments, all of which was recorded and broadcast through the Likud's media outlets. The Elector app also helped Netanyahu map out where his voters were and reach out to many of them. Netanyahu made most of the calls himself, and kept them up until the last few minutes before the exit poll results were announced at 10 p.m. Monday.
Then, Monday evening, Netanyahu saw the fruits of his labor. He had managed to raise voter turnout in dozens of Likud communities, as well as support for the Likud there. However, most of the Likud gains were not attributable to increased voter turnout, but to the Likud's success in taking votes away from Blue and White, the Labor Party, and attracting people who had voted for Kulanu and Moshe Feiglin's Zehut party in April 2019 – not to mention Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beytenu, Yamina, and former Otzma Yehudit voters.
Netanyahu, whose staff carried out lengthy negotiations with the far-right Otzma Yehudit on his behalf, managed to strike them a harsh blow through the discourse itself. Otzma Yehudit's voter base witnessed the party turning from an ideological movement that would not consider any compromise to one that would drop out of the race for the right price. Party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir's support dropped from 84,000 on Sept. 17 to some 20,000 this week. Most of the lost votes went to Agudath Yisrael or the Likud, even in the settlement Yitzhar, which is an Otzma Yehudit stronghold. Even if the party had dropped out of the race, as it almost did, we don't know how many of the people who intended to vote for it would have shown up on Monday to cast ballots for other parties. Netanyahu's calculations seem to have been correct.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu's campaign seems to have caused the collapse, if not annihilation, of three veteran political parties. Blue and White's drop in the polls, which we saw in the last week of campaigning before the election, led the list to seek votes elsewhere in the left-wing bloc – Labor-Gesher-Meretz. The final polls showed the left-wing list winning nine to 10 seats, but it only won seven. The Labor Party has a mere three MKs, as does Meretz. Gesher leader Orly Levy-Abekasis is the only MK representing her party, and seems to have brought in only a few votes.
The left-wing unification was hurt twice – the first time when Jewish voters who had originally supported Meretz - turned away when the party joined up with Labor and Gesher, which they deemed too "right-wing." These voters chose to support the Joint Arab List, which garnered twice the support among Jews that it did in the September election. Jewish votes gave the party two seats. Thousands of Jewish Israelis in Raanana, Herzliya, Givatayim, and Ramat Hasharon voted for the Joint Arab List.
Gesher and Labor also lost votes, but for exactly the opposite reason. Their joint run with Meretz was one step too far to the Left for many of their voters, and they opted to support the center-left Blue and White rather than a left-wing combo deal that included Meretz. So the joint list failed by all parameters, but still seems to have been a political necessity. If the parties had not chosen to run together, some or all of them might have entirely failed to make it past the minimum electoral threshold and into the Knesset.
Another historical party that nearly vanished from our lives was the National Religious Party, or Habayit Hayehudi as it is known in its current incarnation. Habayit Hayehudi ran with Yamina, and it has only one representative - party leader Rabbi Rafi Peretz. This teaches us that the join run by Habayit Hayehudi, Tkuma, and the New Right was a political necessity. If they had run separately, some or all of them might have failed to pass the minimum threshold.
Some Yamina voters – it's still not clear which ones – transferred their support to the Likud. Others, mostly in national-haredi settlements like Beit El, Yitzhar, Elon Moreh, and even Peretz's home community of Naveh, voted for the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael.
Once again, we saw that large sectors in the religious Zionist sector cannot accept differences – liberal voters went to the Likud because they couldn't take Peretz and National Union leader Bezalel Smotrich. National-haredi voters cast ballots for Agudat Yisrael because they couldn't handle the liberal Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked. The "knitted skullcap" crowd showed that it was politically scattered and wound up voting for a variety of parties. Unlike the haredi sector, it can't. and possibly doesn't want to, come together.
The Likud and Netanyahu increased their support in many cities in the periphery, where voter turnout rose – including in the western Negev, which only a week and a half ago was under attack by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
In Sderot, the Likud won 51% of the vote, compared to 43% in September. Sderot is also Labor leader Amir Peretz's hometown, and only 600 of its residents, or 4.4% of voters, supported him. Similar results, and increases, were seen in Ashdod, Dimona, and Ashkelon.
Generally speaking, southern Israel mostly voted for the Likud, which won 50% of the vote in Beersheba, and 47% in Yeruham. The Likud also won big in northern Israel, with 58% of the vote in Kiryat Shmona going to the Likud, 48% in Nahariya, and 51% in Tiberias, as well as 52% in Afula. In all these cities, as well as towns like Safed and Beit Shean, the Likud increased its stock by five to eight percentage points.
In central Israel, however, the battle was more subdued and Blue and White won in many communities, winning 48% of the vote in Tel Aviv, compared to 22% for the Likud. In Haifa, Blue and White won 34% of the vote compared to 26% for the Likud. In Ramat Gan, Blue and White won 47% of the vote compared to 28% for the Likud.
In Modi'in-Maccabim-Reut, a stronghold of Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, No. 2 on the Blue and White list, Blue and White won 45% of the vote, compared to 28% for the Likud. The two cities where the Likud and Blue and White tied last time saw close battles this time around, as well – in Petah Tikva, the Likud won 36% of the vote compared to 28% for Blue and White, while in Rishon LeZion, the fourth-largest city in Israel, the Likud eked out a small win – 40% of the vote compared to 37% for Blue and White.
The secular voters who support a haredi party
In Jerusalem, the right-wing bloc drubbed Blue and White: 28% of voters in the capital voted for the Likud, 24% for United Torah Judaism, and 17% voted for Shas. Blue and White won only 13% of the Jerusalem vote, while another eight percent voted for Yamina.
In Judea and Samaria, which saw lackluster voter turnout last time, more people showed up at the polls on Monday. Yamina won in most of the settlements, but in the larger settlements, the Likud won by a bigger lead than it did in the last election.
The Arab sector saw the biggest rise in voter turnout in 2020. The Joint Arab List won by a huge margin in almost all Arab communities, and the five to 10 percentage-point bump in voter turnout gave it an additional 84,000 votes – which translates to another two Knesset seats.
In the Jewish sector, the "Anyone but Bibi" crowd empowered the prime minister's supporters and boosted their motivation. Among Arabs, Netanyahu's "It's Bibi or [Ahmad] Tibi" campaign had the same effect and wound up strengthening the Arab parties. The Joint Arab List won 80% of the vote in Abu Ghosh and 95% in Nazareth.
The haredi Agudat Yisrael held steady at seven seats. Although the party won tens of thousands more votes than last time, the high voter turnout offset it. The Sephardi Shas, however, continued to gain: In the April 2019 election, it went from seven seats to eight, and in September from eight seats to nine, where it remained after Monday's election. The party estimates that approximately half of its voters are traditional rather than ultra-Orthodox.
The pollster who got it nearly perfect
Pollsters did well in this election. A few days before the election, they spotted the shift, although not its extent. Many of the final polls gave the Likud an edge of one or two seats, when the party was actually ahead by four. The pollsters also failed to predict how badly the Labor-Gesher-Meretz joint ticket would fail, assigning it nine to 10 seats. They also missed how Yamina would shrink.
The first pollster to spot the change in Blue and White's standing was Shlomo Filber. Five days before the election, his prediction was the closest to the actual election results. His Direct Polls Institute said, "The right-wing bloc is nearing 60 seats. The left-wing bloc has 54-55 seats, and Lieberman is dropping to six." For the first time, the institute said, "Otzma Yehudit is below one percent."
Analyzing his predictions, Filber said that "About three seats comprised the final move of vote from the Center-Left to the Right, including Gesher and Kahlon [Kulanu] voters from April 2019," and that "to compensate for votes lost to the Likud, Blue and White is taking about two seats away from Labor-Gesher-Meretz."
Even Filber failed to foresee the massive jump in Arab voter turnout and the Labor-Gesher-Meretz fiasco.
If we had to sum up the 2020 election, we could say that the "second Israel" from the development towns and the periphery and south Tel Aviv, which identifies as more traditional, national, and Jewish, cast its votes for the Likud and its "persecuted" leader, with whom they identify.
They beat the mostly secular and partly left-wing "first Israel," with its candidate of privileged socioeconomic standing, who voted for Blue and White for one reason only – to oust Bibi from power. Netanyahu, who for most of his political life has maintained an ambiguous right-leaning ideology, was all-out right-wing this time. It paid off.
The ideological stance he presented, which leans toward traditional Jewish values and included annexation plans, stood out in comparison to the mishmash of opinions and outlooks in Blue and White, which failed to offer a clear, cohesive line on any of these issues.
