And this also makes me think about the parallel reality we’ve been living in for the past three years. If the polls were that far off, perhaps they were also wrong about what the public wanted on the hostage deal, the war and who should be prime minister. In other words, we’ve been living in a reality we thought was unfolding, when in fact a different one was unfolding.
If you look at the vote shift itself, almost no seats moved from the Netanyahu bloc to the change bloc. The decline has three causes. First, the Arab vote increased by a dramatic one percentage point. Second, no votes were “wasted” on the Meretz and Balad side, as they were last time. And third, about 2.5 percent of the votes were “wasted” on the Netanyahu bloc’s side: Ofer Winter, a few scattered votes for Noam and Leitner, and the Ethiopian Immigrants Party.