The Polls in Israel Don't Lie, But They Mislead

(Written by Roe Kenneth Portal, Economist)

Betting markets currently give Netanyahu a 36% chance of becoming Israel's next prime minister - a fairly low probability for someone who has served almost continuously as Prime Minister since 2009 and who is now in a close race with opposition party leaders competing for the position.

But that's the wrong question.

Polymarket's bets, as of July 8th. Netanyahu, serving almost continuously as Prime minister since 2009, gets only 36% - but that's the wrong question.

Israel is not a presidential system in which voters directly elect the prime minister, and a large share of supporters of the current governing coalition will not cast a ballot with Benjamin Netanyahu's name on it. Israel is a parliamentary democracy, based (more or less) on the British system, and Israelis vote for political parties, not a presidential candidate (meaning a numbered list of politicians, the first of whom will enter the Knesset in order, depending on how many votes the party receives under the national proportional representation system).

The identity of the prime minister is based on who can secure the support of at least 61 members of the Knesset willing to recommend them to form a government.

Yet even when we ask the right question, Israelis watching the news today are presented with two completely contradictory pictures of which coalition actually enjoys public support, with each side accusing the other of ideological bias and manipulated polling.

On one side are two television networks that are broadly identified with the political right and the governing coalition. Channel 14 is closely associated with the Likud and often echoes the messaging of Netanyahu and the ultra-Orthodox parties, while Channel 15 (better known internationally as i24NEWS) is identified more broadly with the ideological right. Both consistently publish polls suggesting that the current coalition - and Likud in particular - has lost very little support since October 7.

On the other side stand the rest of Israel's major broadcasters: Channel 12, the country's leading television network, often dismissed by government supporters as an "opposition channel," despite not being clearly identified with the left and despite several of its senior commentators subtly supporting the government; Channel 13, generally considered center-left and recently acquired by a group of liberal investors; and Israel's public broadcaster, KAN. None of these outlets - or the veteran pollsters working for them - has published a single poll in which the current coalition even comes close to reaching the 61-seat majority needed to form a government. At times, the gap between the "government channels" and the "opposition channels" reaches as many as ten Knesset seats or more. The same goes for the two newspapers that conduct regular polls, Maariv and Israel Hayom, both of which lean to the right.

Expected Knesset seats for Israel's current coalition from 2023 through July 5, 2026, with each poll's predicted seat count for the current coalition represented as a dot, and trends grouped by the media outlet that published the poll. Following a sharp drop around October 7, projections strongly diverge: Channel 14 and i24NEWS show the coalition regaining a 61-seat majority, while the remaining five media outlets show it below 54 seats. Source: The Index (themadad.com/allpolls).

The coalition's leading pollster, Shlomo Filber, began his career as one of Netanyahu's advisers, later became a state witness in Netanyahu's corruption trial, and was welcomed back into Netanyahu's political camp after his testimony weakened parts of the prosecution's case. According to him, the other pollsters all repeat the same methodological mistakes and simply do not know how to locate or accurately survey Netanyahu supporters or ultra-Orthodox voters.

He is almost certainly wrong.

Although Filber's polling was reasonably accurate in the last election, the differences between his surveys and those of other pollsters amounted to only a handful of seats. Today, the gap is simply too large to be explained by legitimate differences in weighting or sampling methodology. The more plausible explanation is that Filber himself is the outlier, not the veteran pollsters who have been forecasting Israeli elections with reasonable accuracy for decades.

The bottom line, however, is this: even if the "opposition polls" are correct in showing that the current coalition has virtually no chance of forming another government after the election without recruiting additional parties from the opposition - which currently categorically refuse to join it and respond with open skepticism to Prime Minister Netanyahu's calls for a "broad government" - it does not mean that an alternative coalition is imminent.

The previous government - the so-called "Government of Change" - was able to take office thanks to the participation of the Arab Islamist party Ra'am, a historic but deeply controversial development in Israeli politics. The partnership between Naftali Bennett's Yamina (literally, "Turning Right") on one side and Ra'am together with Labor and Meretz on the other produced an almost endless series of coalition crises, fueled by the opposition at the time, which ultimately brought the government down.

Today, with the exception of The Democrats (the successor to Labor and Meretz), every Zionist opposition party declares that it will not sit with Ra'am, while the other Arab parties are unwilling in principle to join any Zionist-led coalition. Without Arab support, the opposition's chances of reaching the 61-seat threshold are slim, if not nonexistent.

So where does that leave us?

With two rival political blocs, neither of which has a realistic path to forming a stable governing coalition.

With two competing sets of pollsters, one of which is almost certainly suffering from severe bias - and that is the one consumed by the coalition and its supporters.

So what happens after Election Day?

Polls conducted three months before an Israeli election are not especially informative. During this period, parties are frequently created, merged, split apart, or disappear altogether, shifting seats between blocs and adding or removing votes as they cross the electoral threshold (3.25%) or fail to do so. On top of that, normal sampling error alone can completely alter the picture. Still, if the political map in October resembles what today's polls suggest, several scenarios appear plausible.

The first - and, in recent years, always a possibility - is continued political deadlock. If the parties in the anti-Netanyahu bloc maintain their refusal to form a coalition with either Netanyahu or the Arab parties, and the Likud refuses to abandon its "natural partners" - the ultra-Orthodox parties and the far right - then no member of the Knesset will be able to assemble a governing majority. Israel would once again head to another election, and potentially another after that, until either one side finally gains the upper hand by chance (that is, one of the small parties in the other bloc failing to cross the electoral threshold) or someone decides to break ranks.

Gadi Eisenkot (left) and Naftali Bennet (right). Senior Likud officials have stated that they would refuse to serve under Naftali Bennett or Gadi Eisenkot as prime minister, even if either of them were to win more seats than Netanyahu.

But that is not usually what happens.

If the political history of the past decade teaches us anything, it is that Likud generally succeeds in persuading at least one centrist party to join its coalition, with promises that prove more or less credible. In the current Knesset, the obvious candidate is Benny Gantz, who has already entered governments with Netanyahu twice in the name of national unity - once during the COVID-19 pandemic and again immediately after the outbreak of the October 7 war.

Under that scenario, the key question becomes whether that centrist party joins instead of the far-right or ultra-Orthodox parties - allowing it to moderate some of Likud's more populist impulses - or in addition to them, in which case it would likely serve as a fig leaf.

Another possible outcome is a broad national unity government bringing together Likud with parties from the center and mainstream right, allowing it to govern without the ultra-Orthodox parties and the far right - as some in the center-left hope - and without Ra'am or the left-wing Democrats, as many on the center-right would prefer.

The central obstacle to such a government is resolving the Gordian knot of who would serve as prime minister. Although Likud has previously governed without the ultra-Orthodox under sufficient political pressure, it is doubtful the party would agree to form such a coalition if Benjamin Netanyahu were not its head but rather "just" a senior minister (adding to that a Supreme Court ruling that prohibits him from serving as a minister because he is under indictment). Senior Likud officials have even stated that they would refuse to serve under Naftali Bennett or Gadi Eisenkot as prime minister, even if either of them were to win more seats than Netanyahu.

Seven years ago, Israel went to the polls and the country entered a cycle of five elections in four years. Another election is approaching, but unless the political landscape changes dramatically, Israel's political chaos may only be getting started.

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