Former PM Benjamin Netanyahu appears poised to reclaim the Israeli Prime Ministership after yesterday’s election. Indeed, it looks likely to be by a significantly larger margin than expected. The reason has to do not with questionable polls but with the particular dynamics of the Israeli parliamentary system. Exit polls last night predicated that Netanyahu’s bloc would get 61 or 62 Knesset seats, an extremely tight margin (out of 120) but enough. That was in line with most polls. But he’s now predicted to get 65 seats, a critical difference. What changed is that Meretz, a left-wing party, appears to have fallen just below the parliamentary election threshold of 3.25%. If that holds they’re excluded altogether. So four seats suddenly get pulled out of the center-left bloc and go to other parties. That’s mostly what gets you from 61-62 to 65. It’s not a huge difference. But it’s a critical one and one that stands a good chance of breaking the electoral stalemate of the last four years.

A week ago, everyone who mocking Mehmet Oz’s suggestion that decisions about abortion should be left to the woman, her doctor and “local political leaders.” Now we have a Republican House candidate who’s actually trying to get concrete about how this works in practice. Bo Hines is a Madison Cawthorn-esque candidate who is the Republican nominee in North Carolina’s 13th congressional district. He’s Trump endorsed, with all you’d expect with that. But since getting the nomination he’s apparently been trying to come more towards the political center. Part of that has been trying to work out how the Oz proposal operates in practice.

Minor point. But worth noting. I want to draw your attention to how even very small shifts in voting support could produce huge potential swings in the battle for control of the Senate. The current polls make it entirely plausible that Republicans get a 53 or even 54 seat majority in the Senate. They also make at least 52 and quite possibly 54 seats for the Democrats just as plausible. According to 538’s averages there are 8 races which are within 4 percentage points and 7 within 3. By most standards those are all a coin toss.

GOP Governor candidate Tim Michels says that if he’s elected he’ll change state election laws so that Republicans will never lose another election. “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor,” Michels told supporters at a campaign stop yesterday.

Israel goes to the polls today for the 5th time in three years. The general consensus is that ousted PM Benjamin Netanyahu is more likely than not to be able to form another even harder-right government. (More on that later.) But it’s by no means a certain thing. Basically they’re still in the same deadlock space they’ve been in for years. The only question is whether one side or another manages to get 61 or 62 votes to form a narrow majority coalition.

But one thing is notable: turnout is running much higher than recent elections. It’s currently running more than 6% over the last election, the highest turnout since 1999.

To understand the last six years and the years going forward you have to get your head around this stuff …

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Tom Barrack, a onetime private equity executive and fundraiser for Donald Trump, traded his access to the then-president for investments from the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. prosecutor said on Tuesday during closing arguments in Barrack’s foreign agent trial.

Here’s an annotated version of the criminal complaint against David DePape, the QAnon domestic terrorist who allegedly broke into the home of Speaker Nancy Pelosi to kidnap her and shatter her legs.

I’ve written several posts about Twitter and new boss Elon Musk recently. I’ll probably be writing more. I realize that for those of you who aren’t on Twitter this might seem like an odd or perhaps even annoying focus. This is a political news site, Josh. Why are you going on about Twitter? At one level, I’ve always followed the rule of letting my interests drive my writing focus at TPM. But I don’t write about my ideas about medieval history or my estimation of the new Charlie Watts biography. Here I write about things in the broadly political domain. And Musk’s absurd but consequential Twitter adventure is right at the center of the bigger political issues that animate our age.

One simple note about the polls, especially if you’re a poll obsessive. There’s little question that trends have moved in a GOP direction since mid-October. But there is an important caveat to this. In key Senate races around the country, the polling zone has been absolutely flooded over the last couple weeks with partisan GOP polls. In some cases, I mean literally polls fielded by GOP committees or organizations. In other cases I mean polls like Rasmussen or Trafalgar which may be nominally independent but are clearly partisan and routinely have poll results more friendly to Republican candidates.

“ELON MUSK (and his consortium of much smaller investors) now owns Twitter. We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened.” That’s the lede in Jon Schwarz’s piece on the Elon Musk era on Twitter. I think he is right on target. And that was before Musk went full Alex Jones this morning.