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Plurality of Israelis prefer Trump rerun to second Biden term

Some 72% of those who voted for parties in Israel’s coalition government supported Trump over Biden, while 55% of those who voted for opposition parties preferred Biden.

Trump, Biden
Former U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and U.S. President Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2020. Source: Trump campaign via Facebook/Biden Campaign via Facebook.

Some 44% of Israelis want former President Donald Trump to win November’s election, compared to 30% who would prefer current U.S. President Joe Biden to secure a second term, according to a Channel 12 poll published on Tuesday evening.

And 26% of respondents said they did not know whom they wanted elected.

Breaking the figures down, 72% of respondents who voted for parties in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition said they preferred Trump, while 8% chose Biden. By contrast, 55% of respondents who cast a ballot for parties in the Israeli opposition preferred Biden, compared to 23% for Trump.

The poll of 504 Israelis had a maximum sampling error of 4.4 percentage points.

Trump and Biden clinched the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations, respectively, in primaries earlier on Tuesday, setting up a rematch of the 2020 election.

“I’m scared of what’s going to happen now,” Miri Bar-Halpern, a Jewish psychology lecturer at Harvard Medical School, told JNS. “I can already predict the backlash.”
Netanyahu remains 8 seats short of a Knesset majority as Eisenkot-led bloc secures 48 seats and Arab parties 19.
“They will push legislation very hard to end the Iran war, and it’s not inconceivable that they could get a fair amount of Republican support for that,” William Galston of Brookings told JNS.
“We, in American Jewry, don’t always look through the lens that our Israeli brothers and sisters are looking at the candidates or the issues through,” William Daroff told JNS. “They’re not voting on the issues that we tend to be most focused on.”