This is an important thing to clarify. True, Netanyahu won a very small increase in absolute numbers of votes, but he lost ground by every other metric. He lost not only to the high Arab turnout, he also lost vote share among Jews.

Walk with me for a moment through the numbers. And don't believe the partisans. His supporters will tell you he beat out the Channel 12 polling, which is true. But he also fell far short of Channel 14's polling. The bottom line isn't whether the polls were good (they were not), but in what happened at the actual ballot box. Now that the votes are counted, here's what happened.

From 2022 to 2026, the total eligible-voter population grew by about 8% as just over 600,000 young Israelis turned 18. And that new cohort leans right and religious -- i.e., heavily in Netanyahu's favor. So his "natural" expected growth is probably higher than that.

But Likud's actual vote total grew by just 4.67%.

And some of that was cannibalizing Shas and Otzma, to the frustration of both parties. Netanyahu's bloc as a whole only rose about 3.9%.

Did those young voters stay home? We don't know yet. The age breakdown hasn't been published. But the soldiers' turnout -- most of them young -- was about 80%, higher even than the amazingly high average turnout. It's possible that young Haredi voters stayed home, but this wouldn't explain Likud itself falling behind. And United Torah Judaism's vote total grew by almost 12%, suggesting a high young-Haredi turnout.

Were the losses caused by natural deaths of older Likudniks? Also no. Only about 200,000 people died between the elections, and their age group leans left-ward compared to the general population. The effect was far too little to explain the real-vote gap, and should have favored Netanyahu in vote share.

The same goes for emigration/vote tourism. Probably at least three times as many Israelis left the country since 2022 than could possibly have returned briefly to vote on Election Day (that's an educated guess; I can't find hard numbers). And that emigration was composed of a higher share of opposition voters. This phenomenon should also have favored Netanyahu's bloc in the vote share.

Nor was Likud's decline just a function of Arab turnout, as the real vote numbers show. If you remove Arab-party votes from the total for the past two elections, the Netanyahu bloc's share falls from 54.2% in the 2022 election to 49.4% on Tuesday. That's a decline in the non-Arab vote share, where he only wins about 59 seats.

In other words, even though his camp almost certainly benefited from a young demographic surge, from natural deaths that shrank the opposition, and from three years of relatively high emigration of opposition voters -- Netanyahu still fell behind in overall vote share even among Jews.

That's not enough to "lose" an Israeli election because of how Israel's electoral system works -- and because of how poorly the opposition managed its campaign over the past four years. But there's no way to spin those numbers as a rallying behind Netanyahu. He lost significant ground among veteran right-wing Jewish voters.