Will Netanyahu Return? What Israel’s Last-minute Election Polls Tell Us – and What They Don’t

New poll gives right-wing bloc 61 Knesset seats

Brushing off dire polling, Shaked says Jewish Home will ‘run to the end’

Another poll indicated that if Shaked withdrew, the results wouldn’t be different. She is holding stead at 2% even after Bibi said he would crush her. By staying in the race she is in effect calling Bibi’s bluff. Bibi will shift votes to her if he needs her 4 seats.

The far right is rising, the left is in trouble and Netanyahu’s fate hangs in the balance: Israel’s last-minute pre-election polls are crucial windows into who will win power in Israel – and who Israelis really are

By Dahlia Scheindlin, HAARETZ   

Amazingly, you’re still here, wondering what will happen in the Israeli elections next week. I have no answer, but will try to address a closely related question: What do we know from the polls? What can we expect them to tell us in the final, fateful days, and how much should we believe them??

The best horserace data comes from the same public media polls that are often maligned. True, these are limited samples, usually 500 to 800 respondents; critical subsections, such as Arab or ultra-Orthodox voters, are too small to reveal their internal dynamics. However, they’ve got quantity on their side: by Tuesday, I counted 70 such polls since the elections were called (and maybe I’ve missed a few). That’s plenty for tracking trends, which always matter more than any one survey.

What are those trends telling us? Well, almost precisely what the 2021 election results told us. Take the split in Israel between parties representing right-wing, center and left-wing policies and ideologies, regardless of whether they support or oppose Netanyahu as the next PM.

The average of all polls in the last two weeks (Haaretz collects them, these are my calculations) shows 72 seats going to ideologically right-wing parties, a figure that includes two formally no-to-Bibi parties: Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beitenu, and (my decision) six of National Unity’s seats, representing the right-wing Gideon Saar’s party in the last Knesset before he merged with Benny Gantz. The remaining 48 seats go to center and left parties, and to the Islamist Ra’am (which is hard to categorize) – just like in 2021.

The “blocs,” of parties who support or oppose Netanyahu forming the next government reflect a nearly unwavering dead heat. But tiny trends can be important: Until the party lists were finalized in mid-September, the parties expected to support Netanyahu held a stable average of around 59 seats. Since then the average has crept steadily upward; reaching 60.3 over the last two weeks – not enough for a majority government, but indicating a rise.

The parties expected to oppose a Netanyahu-led government are getting 60 seats. Since the largely Arab Hadash-Ta’al list seems unlikely be invited into a government or to join one, that hypothetical coalition is often counted as 56.

Within the blocs, party fortunes have shifted slightly: Likud has declined from an average of 35 seats at the start of the campaign, to 31.8 throughout October. Not coincidentally, the far-right Religious Zionism has risen steadily, from a nine-seat polling average at the start, to 13 now; some polls give them 14 – more than double its current six seats in Knesset. That would be the highest number for the extreme right in any Israeli election. Yemina’s collapse has helped – according to one survey from early October, the largest portion of ex-Yemina voters, close to 40 percent, are now supporting Religious Zionism.

The average for Yesh Atid, led by Israel’s caretaker prime minister Yair Lapid, has risen from below 21 to 24, reaching a peak of 27 in one survey on Tuesday. Correspondingly, Labor and Meretz, who held 13 seats combined in the outgoing Knesset, are polling at a total of 10 throughout October. Gantz and Saar’s average is 13, just shy of their combined outgoing Knesset strength (14), with no real trend. No fewer than four parties are dangerously close to the minimum 3.25 percent threshold and all of them are in the non- Netanyahu bloc. If any of them fall, he wins.

In other words: most voters haven’t changed their minds. They meant it the first four times.

There are other kinds of polls too. One kind is sadly inaccessible to regular consumers: the closely-guarded internal polls conducted for parties to help guide their campaign. As I’ve written before, these are far superior: they often have bigger samples and far more detailed contextual questions, and run intricate cross-tabulations to learn about subgroups.

But there’s a great substitute for those who want the bigger picture: pollsters are required to send their electoral data to the Central Election Committee, which publishes the material online. Those polls often include fascinating additional questions, such as whether Israel should supply weapons to Ukraine (nearly twice as many say no as yes) and who “won” the Gaza escalation in August, Israel or Islamic Jihad (Israel by a wide margin, but a grim 39 percent believe neither side won or they don’t know).

There are also important contextual political questions: How will you feel if the ‘bloc’ you oppose wins? (“mild depression” – 31 percent, “my state is gone” – 25 percent; the rest say it won’t affect them or don’t know); suitability to be prime minister (Netanyahu’s support is iron-clad in the low- to upper-40 percent range, like in this one from August, or this one from October) – which largely explains why his bloc wins about half the Knesset seats. Another poll tested whether it’s legitimate to have (Jewish supremacist) Itamar Ben-Gvir as a minister: 44 percent said yes.

Then there are the exit polls. These involve a complex methodology of querying people’s choice from representative locations, moments after they’ve voted, and broadcasting the results with high drama at 10pm after polls close – like in the U.S., each television station does its own projections. These are often very close to the real results; the failures of 2015 were the outlier. But small shifts within the margin of error can throw off mandates significantly, which can make or break a coalition bloc.

What could go wrong? For one, polls often miss the “surprise” – a cluster of additional seats going to one party that defied predictions. Famously, final polls in 2013 showed Lapid’s Yesh Atid at 11 seats, but the brand-new party won a bombshell 19; in 1999, ultra-Orthodox Shas surprised everyone with 17 seats. To speculate on surprises, I recommend assessing undecided voters and turnout dynamics.

Mano Geva of the Midgam agency, among the best pollsters in Israel, told me: “If we could predict it, it wouldn’t be a surprise.” He reported that there are few “hard” undecided, maybe five percent, but they’re deciding within the Bibi or non-Bibi blocs. Itzik Katz of the Maagar Mohot agency found declining overall turnout already in early October, even among Jews, with particularly low Arab rates (one-third); while other polls and pollsters have indicated some recovery for both since then – closer to the 67 percent turnout of 2021.

Most intriguing was Katz’s finding that among respondents most likely to vote, Netanyahu’s bloc had a hefty 64-seat majority.

Mano Geva commendably drills home that polls show the present, not the future. I find trends very useful, but strictly speaking, they only reveal what’s happened so far. Therefore, look out for the final polls usually published on Friday before elections, to see if they reinforce (or reverse) late stage trends.

The angriest criticism I hear is that publishing polls can influence how people vote – whether to save a tiny party from falling under the threshold, to strengthen a big one, or to abandon parties that polls show won’t make it into the Knesset, thus wasting their vote. This reinforces “strategic” voting, rather than what some frame as the more noble ideological or issue voting. It’s a reasonable observation.

But blaming the polls is largely misplaced. People vote strategically because Israel has a multi-party parliamentary system that is heavily fragmented – and that’s not the polls’ fault. And is there really a dichotomy between ‘strategy’ and ‘ideology’? People make strategic choices to boost the chances their ideological camp can win.

Finally, people are always affected by their perception of what their society thinks – without polls, they would just guess how parties are doing based on what their mom or their mechanic says. Polls are one of many ways we (think) we know who we are – just the most systematic. It’s people who are infinitely complex. When Othello said, “by heaven, I’ll know thy heart,” Iago told him off and Othello went nuts. Polls can do only marginally better than Shakespeare.

The truth is, when people get angry at polls, it’s usually because they’re angry at the results. But in that case, they just don’t like what they see in the social mirror.

Dahlia Scheindlin is a political scientist and public opinion expert, and a policy fellow at The Century Foundation. Twitter: @dahliasc