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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

23% "Considering" voting for Yair Lapid-headed list

I've been hoping Yair Lapid would get into politics since I started reading his columns in Yedioth Ahronot. He's recently been moving more surely in that direction, and the latest Haaretz-Dialog poll has potentially good news in that 23% of Israelis are "considering" him.

How the news is, of course, depends on exactly how תשקול להצביע לה was interpreted by voters, i.e. whether they interpreted תשקול more as "not ruling out" or as "my number choice right now" or (more likely) somewhere in the middle of the two; my Hebrew is not good enough to make a guess, unfortunately, especially since I'd have difficulty figuring out how American voters would have interpreted a similar question asked in English.

Certainly, if it can be interpreted as having a real shot at 28-29 mandates, that's not bad at all. The article notes that nearly half of those mandates (approximately 14) would be from people who said Kadima in the poll that asked only about parties running in the last election.

I would be interested to know whether the other half came from. I have to assume a decent number came from either Likud or Yisrael Beitenu, since (sadly) the descendants of the two largest parties (Labour and Meretz) in the 1st Knesset election only get 14 seats combined in the latest poll.