Shas supporting another party?

We already discussed Shas regretting the early days of their election campaign.

Shas kicked off their campaign with a bang. They put massive signs up all over the country banking on their support for Netanyahu, but they promoted Netanyahu in all their ads. Shortly after they discovered that they were promoting Netanyahu so hard that they were losing many of their voters to the Likud. They stopped that campaign and changed channels to focus on other things and directions in their campaign.

Now, Shas might be making that same mistake again.

UTJ held a massive rally, with Rav Chaim Kanievsky's participation, the other day. In addition, they have plastered his image and words of support for UTJ all over the country, and even on the Internet and social media in a significant way. The other day they put out a video of Rav Chaim Kanievsky being asked about Haredim who vote for secular parties, and Rav Chaim responded "they will have children like that". UTJ promoted this to scare people into voting UTJ. And now Shas took that same video, added their banner at the end saying it is a mitzva to vote Shas and are publishing the video wherever they can.

Degel said they don't rally care and Shas can use it if they want to. (source: Actualic) Degel is ok with it, despite the back and forth between Shas and UTJ going on right now with Shas accusing UTJ of trying to poach Shas voters, and UTJ simply saying it is elections and everyone has the right to campaign to everyone and points to Shas trying to poach UTJ voters as well, but Shas remains especially upset.

The interesting thing to me is that this is an ad similar to the earlier ad promoting Netanyahu. The image of Rav Chaim Kanievsky is embedded in people's brains as UTJ, specifically Degel Hatorah. Will people see the ad and realize what it is and not just think "Shas supports UTJ", the same way they saw the earlier ad and saw that Shas supports Netanyahu? I don't think UTJ would use the image of Rav Ovadia Yosef in their campaign just because everyone would associate that with Shas and not UTJ. It is bad marketing. Shas continues to include in their campaign images that are associated in people's minds with other parties. That is bad marketing.

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