Polls get it wrong as Netanyahu wins big

This story originally appeared at The Media Line.

Israelis went to sleep believing that the two largest parties – the Likud of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Zionist Union headed by Isaac Herzog – had each received 27 seats in the Israeli Knesset, and Israel’s President could ask either party to try to form a governing coalition. When they woke up, Likud had surged to 30 seats, and Herzog had plummeted to 24. The result defied both the exit polls, and almost all of the polls taken in the weeks and even days leading up to the elections.

“I can’t tell you what the other guys did, but all along I had Likud ahead of the Zionist Union,” Avi Degani, the president of Geocartography Knowledge Group, GKG, told The Media Line. “Ten days before the election I had Likud at 26 seats, and Zionist Union at 21.”

Most other pollsters in the week preceding the election had Zionist Union ahead of Likud by three or four seats. Degani says GKG does only telephone polls, and make sure to include all of the sectors of Israel’s population – Jews, Arabs, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopians, ultra-Orthodox – while some of his colleagues use the internet to conduct their polls.

“In internet polls, you get too many tech-savvy people from Tel Aviv and not enough poor people who live on the periphery,” he said.

At the same time, Israel’s election rules do not allow new polls to be published in the final days of the campaign, meaning they did not reflect changes that occurred in the last few days. Netanyahu launched a full-court press to get voters from the smaller parties on the right, especially the Jewish Home of Naftali Bennett, and a new far-right party called Yachad, to vote for him instead. He also used social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and personalized email messages and phone calls on the day of the vote to warn that Arab citizens of Israel were turning out in droves to vote for the new joint Arab party, which won 14 seats, and became the third-largest party in the government.

Those comments by Netanyahu sparked anger among both Arab citizens of Israel and dovish Israelis.

“Netanyahu's comments have clearly crossed a red line, Amnon Be'eri Sulitzeanu, the co-Director of The Abraham Fund, an organization devoted to coexistence said in a statement. “Imagine a Presidential candidate in the United States, for instance, warning the public of voting trends among Afro-Americans or Jews. These statements join a long history of similar provocations made by Netanyahu and other party leaders against Arab society – which cause long-term damage to Jewish-Arab relations in Israel.”

But the messages were also effective and many who had been planning to vote for smaller parties on Israel’s right changed their mind at the last minute. Just a few days before the election, about 20 percent of Israelis said they still did not know who they were voting for.

“Netanyahu gambled that even though economics were at the forefront of the campaign, people would not want to vote for the Zionist Union,”  Mitchell Plitnick, program director at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, told The Media Line. “He is still not popular among the right but he is still seen by most Israelis as the best of a bunch of bad choices.”

Plitnick says that most of the extra seats Netanyahu received came from right-wing parties and that the right, left, and center blocs did reflect the pre-election polls.

“The blocs haven’t changed at all, and the center hasn’t changed much,” Guy Ben Porat, a professor of public policy at Ben Gurion University told The Media Line. “Before Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party had 19 seats, now he and Kahlon (the head of a new centrist party called Kulanu) are sharing them.”

Many Israeli analysts said that Netanyahu could expect a chilly reception from the White House, just weeks after he addressed Congress despite objections from President Obama. There was no congratulatory call from the White House almost 24 hours after the polls closed.