Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennett, who are running for the Knesset in the Jewish Home Party. Bennett says, “There will never be a peace plan with the Palestinians.” Photograph by Michal Chelbin.

For this week’s issue, David Remnick travels to Israel in advance of the country’s upcoming elections, and writes about “the implosion of the center-left and the vivid and growing strength of the radical right.” Remnick speaks to Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Habayit Hayehudi party and “the newest phenomenon in Israeli politics.” A forty-year-old settlement leader, software entrepreneur, and ex-Army commando, Bennett, who alks about “reviving” Zionism through an infusion of “Jewish values,” and his party represent the merger and a reinvigoration of two older religious parties, and he is rapidly gaining ground… Read more: http://nyr.kr/Wyk7A0

In today’s Daily Comment, Steve Coll argues that putting an end to gerrymandering would help to build a better democracy by fully enfranchising voters:

…the House Republicans’ check on Obama’s power is not truly democratic; indeed, it is based on extreme ideas that would be marginalized if not for the creative drawing of districts.

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/UO4r1f

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The race for the White House will most likely be “wide open” after Hillary Clinton serves her two terms as President, experts agree. Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/VVftBU

We’d been watching the debates, and trying to decide, after each, who won. Then the kids started pulling out the measuring cups and the teaspoons and the canisters of flour and sugar. They’d all bake something, and the grownups were supposed to taste each, and vote. The balloting was fraught. How do you vote against a sugar cookie? But it got me wondering about what elections look like to first-timers. Did politics look to them like a confection, Ron Paul a lemon square, Rick Perry marzipan?

Jill Lepore on how kids vote: http://nyr.kr/U9hzXV

The New Yorker will have live coverage of Election Night and results from around the country here, beginning at around 6:30 P.M. E.T. Be sure to check back often for updates, and read all our other election content at The Political Scene.

This democracy may have ninety-nine problems; debates aren’t one: http://nyr.kr/SLu4fz

Election Day is coming at last, and bringing with it triumph, disappointment, anger, dismay—maybe even hope and change. Also, cartoons. Click-through for a selection, showing how New Yorker cartoonists have exercised the humor franchise: http://nyr.kr/SoljFl

In this week’s issue, Jane Mayerwrites about the man behind the myth that American elections are threatened by fraudulent voters. Many election experts say that Hans von Spakovsky, a conservative Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Justice Department, and is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has played an “improbably large” part in fanning fear about voter fraud. Click-through to read “The Voter-Fraud Myth.”

Adam Gopnik on the problem of chance in baseball playoffs and elections, and how we will look back upon the next three weeks in the future: 

What is true of sports narratives is yet truer, and yet still less accepted, of elections. The Bill James revolution has come to politics and polling now …but not, one might say, the Henry James revolution that ought to go with it, where we stand in awe of how chance events can seem in retrospect like fated certainties…

Continue reading.