A Channel 12 survey found 64% of Israeli respondents said President Donald Trump's endorsement would not affect their vote, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance declined to endorse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Oct. 19 survey asked about Trump's backing ahead of Israel's Oct. 27 parliamentary election. It found that 12% said the endorsement strengthened their support for Netanyahu's Likud party, while 17% said it made them less likely to vote for Likud. Channel 12 questioned 507 people and estimated its largest sampling error at 4.4 percentage points.
Those responses describe what voters said about the endorsement. They do not measure a change in votes cast or establish how the election will turn out.
Vance gave his position in an interview with Mark Halperin published Oct. 19. "I'm not getting involved in Israeli elections," he said. Vance told Halperin he was concentrating on candidates in the U.S. midterms.
Trump had publicly backed Netanyahu on Oct. 18. Vance has supported a candidate in another country's election: At an April rally in Budapest, he called for Viktor Orbán's reelection as Hungary's prime minister. He did not explain that difference in the Halperin interview.
The National calculated an average of three surveys that put Gadi Eisenkot's bloc at 52 seats and Netanyahu's at 51, with 17 seats unaligned. In that average, neither bloc was projected to reach the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-member Knesset.
Israeli voters elect the Knesset through nationwide proportional representation; they do not choose a prime minister directly. The Central Elections Committee has set the vote for Oct. 27. The U.S. general election follows on Nov. 3, and the committee has scheduled publication of Israel's results for Nov. 4.
