143: How to win the Israeli election

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Israel's first election since October 7 will be held on October 27 -- and the system it runs through is one of the simplest in the free world, which is exactly why the results look insane from outside.

One district: the whole country. One ballot slip. You vote for a party, never a person.

In this primer, Haviv walks through how a slip of paper becomes 120 Knesset seats: the 3.25% threshold that erased Bennett and Shaked's party in 2019 by just 1,380 votes, the Bader-Ofer leftover math that quietly rewards big parties and can decide the election, and the surplus-vote agreements filed by October 16 that could hand a bloc the last two seats -- and the country.

Plus: why the most chaotic Knesset in memory produced the most stable government since 1973, why religiosity predicts an Israeli's vote better than income or ethnicity, the Haredi demographic numbers nobody can wish away, and the most under-covered story of the cycle -- Arab turnout.

By the end you'll know what to watch on election night, and why Israeli broadcasts will be excitedly obsessing about "Bader-Ofer" on election night.

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This episode is sponsored by David Allouch and is dedicated “to the next generation, among whom are my amazing nieces, Tali and Elsa; my equally amazing nephew, Ilan; and the children of my dear friend Binyamina, Shmuel, Freidel Esther and Eliyahu. May they all continue to thrive and bring their intellectual creativity to the world, as their ancestors did before them.”

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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.