Israel prime minister odds: Eizenkot leads Netanyahu as Trump delays endorsement

With eight days until Israel votes, prediction markets have settled into a clear read that has held through a full weekend of campaigning: polling for the former army chief Gadi Eizenkot to become the next prime minister, and an incumbent trading well below even odds as President Trump throws his support behind Benjamin Netanyahu.

The numbers as of the 2026-10-19 morning print, pulled from the Polymarket and Kalshi event feeds: Polymarket's "Prime Minister of Israel after the next election" market carried a 48.2 percent probability on Eizenkot, a 28.5 percent probability on Netanyahu, and an 11.5 percent probability on Naftali Bennett, with Benny Gantz and everything else splitting the remainder. That market writes contracts that resolve to YES if the named candidate sits as prime minister on January 1, 2027, so it prices the full path from ballot to government formation.

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Kalshi runs the race as a mutually exclusive field under the event ticker KXISRAELPM-26OCT27, settling on the Knesset's designation of a prime minister before Oct 27, 2027. Its Benjamin Netanyahu contract traded at 30 cents on the YES side with a matching 70 cent NO last printed in this session's live pull, a level that prices the incumbent below even odds to keep the premiership. The category is far from over: the gap between the two venues on Netanyahu, roughly 28.5 cents on Polymarket against 30 cents on Kalshi, is thin enough to be noise rather than a signal of disagreement.

The freshest political input hit late on Oct 18, when Trump posted his "Complete and Total Endorsement" of Netanyahu to the people of Israel, calling the prime minister a "Great Warrior" and a partner against Iran, according to the Associated Press and The Washington Post. The endorsement landed nine days before the vote after months in which Trump had repeatedly declined to back Netanyahu, telling the Axios reporter Barak Ravid that he was "always going to do that. I just didn't want to do it too soon."

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The market's near-term reaction was muted. Netanyahu's probability on Polymarket sat at 28.5 percent in this morning's pull, essentially where the race stood before Sunday. The reason is that endorsements are already priced in as a likely event in a tight race, and because the weekend's polls did not give the incumbent's bloc the kind of clean lead that would break formation math in his favor.

The Kan public broadcaster's Sunday poll, carried by Haaretz, put Netanyahu's bloc at 51 seats against an opposition majority of 65, including 13 Arab-backed seats, with Eizenkot's own Yashar party taking a projected 23 seats and Likud 21. The i24NEWS poll published the same day showed Likud slipping to 25 seats, the coalition bloc at 57, short of the 61 needed for a majority, and Itamar Ben Gvir's party crossing into double digits. Neither survey hands anyone a 61-seat coalition outright, which is exactly the scenario that keeps the prime-minister market as competitive as it is and that leaves room for the post-election bargaining the venues must price.

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That is the structural point worth watching in these markets. The contracts do not resolve on election day. They resolve on who actually takes office, which in Israel can come weeks after the vote through coalition negotiations that span ideological lines. The Oct 27 result will win a mandate to negotiate, not the premiership itself. So a market that prices Eizenkot at 48 percent and Netanyahu at 28 percent is expressing a view on two things at once: how favorable the seat math is to each camp, and how likely each leader is to convert those seats into a government.

On the first half, the seat counts are close enough that both camps plausibly stay within reach of a governing coalition. On the second half, the market is currently giving Eizenkot more credit than the incumbent, a relative cheapening of Netanyahu that predates the latest endorsement cycle and has narrowed only marginally since. A candidate who outperforms the other on the question of who can actually assemble 61 votes should command the higher price, and that is what these odds say right now.

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The bear case for the favourite is the incumbency and coalition record itself. Netanyahu has negotiated his way back into the premiership before, and the market's read that he enters the week at around 30 percent is not a dismissal of that path; it is a pricing of the higher hurdle of holding 61 seats together under indictment and an unpopular war. The bear case for a clear outcome in either direction is the wide effective field, where 20 percent of Polymarket's probability sits outside the third name, any piece of which can become a kingmaker in formation talks.

The next decision point for the market is polling week, with the final legal polling window before the Oct 27 ballot closing this week, followed by the election itself and then the referral of the task of forming a government. The venues will keep re-pricing formation probabilities in real time as coalition numbers harden. The alert to watch is not the vote share so much as the speed with which any single camp clears 61, because that is the number these contracts are actually trading.

This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.