Israeli poll update- three days and counting.

According to the latest polls, Kadima has continued to drop slightly, following the downward trend that has been plauging it since Sharon's stroke when it peaked at 40. Still, 36 isn't anything to scoff at. Labor is up to 21, with Likud down to 14. Again, Shas & Yisrael Beteinu are tied, but this time at 11, instead of 10.

Also: NU-NRP up to 9, Arab parties 8, and Meretz up to 6. UTJ, however, is down one to 5. I guess Gafni isn't as effective a campaigner as he thought.

...sometimes a few votes is enough to lose a mandate that could have been crucial to the fate of chareidi Jewry in Israel in the coming years. In history one will be able to examine what was the turning point for the worse in 5766 and calculate how one or two mandates were lost...

Mazel Tov, Moshe. Maybe you should leave this stuff to your Hasidic counterparts, like MK Litzman, who has apparently shifted his loyalty from Ger to Ruzhin.

Edit: Actually, if even his Grand Holiness the Prophet HaRav Eliashiv super-duper shlita can't get people to vote for UTJ, they're probably up shit creek.

On the other hand...

The UTJ campaign headquarters notes that everyone can daven for the success of the list.

Great. Maybe they'll even vote, too.

Double-edit: Incidentally, note who ISN'T getting any mandates. Shocking, I can't imagine why their brilliant campaign strategy of being racist assholes isn't working.

Lastly, as always, remember: polls don't have all the answers. This explains why.

Sharon suffered a stroke on Jan. 4, and the militant Hamas group swept Palestinian parliamentary elections Jan. 25. Yet neither major event caused a ripple in the polls. Pollsters are wondering what's going on.

"All this gives me the impression of quicksand," said pollster Rafi Smith.

The main added variable is Kadima itself. It sprang from nowhere into the lead. Previous attempts to forge centrist parties in Israel have ended in flashy failures. Now the pollsters have to readjust their assumptions _ or throw them out.

With predictions of a turnout of less than 60 percent and polls showing more than 20 percent undecided, the trick is to figure out who is going to vote at all, and where the wavering voters will come to rest.

Pollsters say a key to predicting what undecided voters will do is what they did last time. Follow-up questions allow pollsters to cut the undecided number to 3 or 4 percent, Zemach said. In the end, they tend to "go home," voting the same way as before. With the emergence of Kadima, that no longer works. Likud and Labor are traditionally Israel's largest parties, but they're suddenly also-rans.

"This is the hardest assumption we have to make," said Zemach, who has been conducting pre-election polls since 1973 and is Israel's best-known pollster, adding that "we no longer have the luxury" of putting voters back in their old parties...His own polls consistently show Kadima winning about 35 seats, but his gut feeling is different. "I don't have the impression that every third person is actually going to vote for Kadima," he said, warning of election night surprises.

Very informative.