'Yom Kippur for most pollsters': What Israel’s election taught us about certainty - comment

The Jerusalem Post · ZVIKA KLEIN · 2026-11-03 22:23 UTC

Israel’s election forced us to rethink the pollsters we trusted and the assumptions we brought into the newsroom

It was after 2 a.m. at Likud’s campaign headquarters in Petah Tikva, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to know whether our diplomatic correspondent, Amichai Stein, and I were tired. Some of the people around him had fallen asleep on couches and chairs. He had just turned 77 and seemed perfectly happy to carry on. We were doing our best to keep up.

That conversation has been on my mind since the election. Listening to Netanyahu describe his political position, I thought he was living in a fantasy world. I had been following polls that showed a much weaker Likud. His confidence in his support struck me as another example of a politician believing his own campaign.

We had challenged him on Qatar, his coalition partners, and Israel’s relationship with Washington after US President Donald Trump. When we raised the polls and his difficulty assembling a majority, he gave a fairly measured answer: “I think right now it’s an even tie. That’s what I see in the big numbers.”

Read the full story at The Jerusalem Post · All coverage of this story