A new poll by Mako and the Knesset Channel showed that if Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked and her Jewish Home party drop out of the race, the Likud-led bloc would lose out much as it would if she ran and did not pass the electoral threshold..
According to the poll, the Likud would win 32 Knesset seats, with Yesh Atid coming in at 24.
Religious Zionism would win 13 seats, the National Unity party would win 11, and Shas would win eight, with United Torah Judaism coming in with seven seats.
The smaller parties would be Labor and Yisrael Beytenu with six seats each; Meretz with five seats; and Hadash-Ta'al (the remnants of the Joint Arab List) and the United Arab List (Ra'am) with four seats each.
In total, the right-religious bloc led by the Likud and MK Benjamin Netanyahu would win 60 Knesset seats, while the current coalition partners, led by Yesh Atid, would win 56 seats. The remaining four seats would go to Hadash-Ta'al, which does not join any coalition.
In this poll - strikingly similar to a poll published earlier Thursday by Israel Hayom and Maagar Mochot - the Jewish Home party would not pass the electoral threshold.
However, if the Jewish Home were to drop out of the race, the poll claims it would impact the elections results: In that scenario, the National Unity party would rise to 12 Knesset seats, and a third of a Knesset seat would go to Religious Zionism. In this scenario, the Likud-led bloc would win just 59 seats, compared to the center-left bloc which would win 57 seats.