How could the media have been so blind?
This posting has these items:
1) Washington Post: How did Israel’s pollsters miss Netanyahu’s reelection?;
2) Al Monitor: Netanyahu’s victory is the Israeli media’s failure;
3) Politico: Why the Media Always Get Israeli Elections Wrong;
4) Reuters: Netanyahu’s shock re-election leaves Israel’s pollsters red-faced;
5) LA Times: How did the polls in Israel get it so wrong?;
6) The Telegraph: How did Benjamin Netanyahu pull off surprise victory?, Netanyahu’s strategist explains how – lure the right-wing back into Likud thus diminishing the right-wing rivals;
Reading Israeli newspapers Yedioth Aharonot (L) and Israel HaYom (R) in Jerusalem, Feb. 25, 2015. Photo by Thomas Coex / AFP/Getty Images)
How did Israel’s pollsters miss Netanyahu’s reelection?
By Adam Taylor and Peyton M. Craighill, Washington Post
March 18, 2015
If you thought that Benjamin Netanyahu’s time in office might be coming to an end this week, you were not alone. Even the Israeli prime minister himself seemed worried about the possibility. “If we don’t close the gap, there is a real danger that a left-wing government will rise to power,” he warned supporters at a Tel Aviv rally on Sunday.
In the aftermath of Tuesday’s vote, that idea seems absurd. Netanyahu has not only won the election, but he has done so by a very comfortable margin. Observers are now beginning to wonder whether Israel’s political polling companies, which had recently given Netanyahu rival Isaac Herzog an edge, painted a misleading portrait of the country’s electorate. “So, about those Israeli pollsters….” the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted wryly as the scale of Likud’s win became clear.
Did Israel’s pollsters fail? And if so, why? Examining both the country’s pre-election polls and its exit polls paints a complicated picture.
Pre-election polls
When pre-election polls don’t match election results, a return to first principles of polling is a good starting point to understand what went wrong. In this instance, the pre-election polls were not only inaccurate, they actually suggested the wrong winner. Final polls showed Herzog’s Zionist Union alliance with a three- to four-seat edge over Netanyahu’s Likud party, but Likud ended up prevailing by six seats.
There are two primary explanations for the polling errors: Either respondent opinions changed from the time the poll was taken or there was flawed polling methodology.
The first explanation could be that the polls were right at the time they were conducted but that voters changed their minds in the days between the final published polls and election day. Israeli election laws prohibit the publication of pre-election polls in the last four days of a campaign. Robust campaigning by Netanyahu in the final days, or strategic voting in reaction to the polls, may have changed preferences substantially and made the final published polls look wrong.
There is anecdotal evidence of this late switch among voters. While the media are prohibited from publishing polls, campaign pollsters continued to conduct internal polls. Those results have remained private, but some Twitter whispers suggest that the race narrowed toward the end.
The second explanation goes to the fundamentals of polling methodology. This remains a big question because many public polls in Israel lack fundamental disclosures about how the surveys were conducted. The Huffington Post’s Mark Blumenthal, who tracked the Israeli pre-election polls, closely found a “profound lack of transparency of their methods.” Blumenthal also noted that while poll forecasters underestimated the share of seats won by Netanyahu’s party, they were fairly accurate in gauging the number of seats won by pro-Netanyahu parties.
Understanding how polls are conducted helps to explain inherent biases in the methods of sampling and data gathering. For example, a poll that gathers data by telephone may not include cellphones. Internet-based polls typically only include those who have Internet access. Each of these polling methods would exclude significant portions of the population that are systematically different from the entire voting population.
Pollsters try to account for these differences by adjusting the data to known characteristics of the population. But without publishing these details, there is little way to understand what went wrong and why.
Exit polls
Even if Netanyahu’s last-minute campaigning changed minds in the final few days, that wouldn’t account for the results of five exit polls conducted Tuesday by Israeli media companies. On average (and with a remarkable lack of divergence), these polls found a dead heat between Likud and the Zionist Union.
Exit polls are fundamentally different from pre-election polls. Rather than asking potential voters who they might vote for, polling companies set up outside voting stations and ask people who they voted for. While they might not get every single voter to reveal their choice, they take demographic information that should allow them to make predictions about how the entire country might vote.
Joe Lenski, an expert on exit polls at Edison Research, is quick to caution that even at best, polls can only make predictions. “Exit polls have margin of errors like any other survey,” he says in a phone interview. “It just becomes magnified when races are this close.”
Lenski does not work on polling in Israel, but he did point to media reports he had seen that suggested possible problems in Israeli exit polling. First, he noted that some Israeli polling experts believe Likud supporters had refused to participate in exit polls more than any other group.
“In certain voting stations, voting stations in places where there are a lot of new immigrants, pro-Likud ballot boxes, the percent of those who voted (in the exit polls) was especially low,” Channel 2 TV’s pollster Mina Tzemach told Israel’s Army Radio, according to Reuters. This is a common issue in exit polls, Lenski explains, and generally polling companies take demographic details from non-responses and adjust results accordingly.
Another potential factor that Lenski noted were reports that the polling companies had stopped interviewing voters about two hours before the polls closed in a bid to have numbers for news reports at the 10 p.m. close of polls. In closing their polls early, pollsters may have missed a last-minute rush from right-wing voters. Counting the votes of members of the Israeli army also was known to be a problem, Lenski added. The soldiers vote earlier than the rest of the population and follow different procedures.
Errors in exit polls occur all over the world — in the 2004 U.S. presidential election, for instance, a number of polling companies, including Edison, were found to have made errors that led to inflated estimates of support for John Kerry in exit polls. Israel, with its diverse range of parties, may present an especially complicated task for pollsters.
“They have a really tough time in Israel,” Lenski says. “They’re not only estimating the top two candidates, they’re trying make seat estimates for 10 parties.”
Adam Taylor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Originally from London, he studied at the University of Manchester and Columbia University.
Peyton M. Craighill is polling manager for the Washington Post. Peyton reports and conducts national and regional news polls for the Washington Post, with a focus on politics, elections and other social and economic issues.
Netanyahu’s victory is the Israeli media’s failure
The Israeli media chose to ignore political realities and to build up the image of Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog instead of taking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign seriously.
By Mazal Mualem, trans. Danny Wool, Al Monitor / Israel Pulse
March 18, 2015
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was apparently surprised himself by the extent of his victory in the 2015 elections. Not least because that very afternoon, the Likud headquarters was abuzz with rumours that the race against the Zionist Camp was tight, with both parties hovering around a projected 25 seats. Even Netanyahu never imagined a sweeping victory of 30 seats. As time passed, however, and the clock ticked down to the end of voting, he finally realized that he had actually managed to avoid a devastating loss that he himself initiated, and was on his way to his fourth term in office.
Netanyahu is, unquestionably, the biggest surprise of the 2015 elections. The election day momentum was all his, as was the emotional support of the nationalist camp that went out of its way to save his rule. Actually, he and his staff started seeing a return to the Likud by the end of last week. This was most apparent among voters for HaBayit HaYehudi, but it was also evident among the Likud’s traditional base. Something lit a spark under them.
These trends intensified as election day approached. Newspapers, TV news programmes and the parties themselves all conducted their own polls. That was why, on election eve, the Zionist Camp pulled out its big announcement that co-leader Tzipi Livni was giving up on the rotation agreement for the premiership, as if it were a rabbit to be pulled out of a hat. They also saw their lead disappearing, even though on March 13, the last day that polls could be published, all indications were that the Zionist Camp still held its advantage.
Anyone expecting the collapse of the Likud to 19 seats or less was proven wrong. Likud Knesset members and ministers alike began reporting that their base was returning home. The phenomenon began with Netanyahu’s March 12 media blitz, during which he was interviewed on virtually every network and later every other platform, too. It was immediately evident that it was working. On Friday evening, for example, Knesset member Ayelet Shaked of HaBayit HaYehudi was the guest of a national-religious family living in one of the settlements. While she was there, she saw with her own eyes how votes were slipping away from her own party, straight to Netanyahu. Shaked, who is secular, left her religious hosts’ home and immediately placed an urgent call to one of the party leaders. “Netanyahu is sucking up all our seats. We’ll only get eight. It’s crazy!” she said. Once the Sabbath was over, HaBayit HaYehudi Chair Naftali Bennett reported the same phenomenon.
As such, the question that should be asked is why the media was oblivious to all this. Why didn’t it see — and report on — these rends? Why did it stick to the idea that Zionist Camp co-leader Isaac Herzog would spearhead a turnover? These questions must be asked and investigated, and not just for the purpose of casting blame. The media must learn from what happened and take account of its mistakes. It is no secret that some major media outlets, headed by the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper and the Ynet website, waged a bitter, impassioned campaign against Netanyahu. Nor is it a secret that there was a business aspect to their campaign, which was part of their heated competition with the prime minister’s newspaper Yisrael Hayom, published by his sponsor, American billionaire Sheldon Adelson.
But it was not only powerful media outlets that played an active role in the political gamesmanship. Several journalists from the full range of the media spectrum were also in on the game in an unprecedented manner — and that is why they were so blinded, why even the most insightful political pundits had their sensors turned off. The mainstream media played an active role in building up Herzog as an alternative to Netanyahu. It coddled him. It kept mum about his weaknesses. More generally, it collaborated with his campaign, all in the spirit of the old showbiz saying, “Quiet on the set!”
Netanyahu plodded along in place throughout the entire campaign, disappointing the public, including his nationalist base. What was especially disappointing was the flagrant way that he ignored the shockwaves set off by the social protests, insisting on sticking to his agenda of fear mongering and threats. That is why Yair Lapid’s “You’re disconnected” campaign was so effective. The public internalized the idea that in his six years in the prime minister’s office, Netanyahu had done nothing to resolve the housing crisis. That inaction worked to his detriment. So did profligate spending and the way he ran his own household.
As these stories reach their climax, Netanyahu could barely eke out 20 seats in the polls, a symbolic red line. He would have a hard time recovering from anything less than that. For the most part, the media shared in this sense of revulsion with the prime minister, as did even some members of the Likud. Where the media went wrong, however, was letting all this became so much a part of its agenda that it preferred not to read the intelligence reports coming in. After all, they did not coincide with the media’s own election conceptions about Netanyahu.
Journalists spoke to each other as well as to the political group that they wanted to see ascend to the winner’s podium on election night. That looks like why some of them bought into the Zionist Camp’s spin, which in one instance claimed that Herzog was ahead of Netanyahu by almost 10 seats. If only they had cast the slightest doubt at these figures, they would have found that no serious pollster — and no party for that matter — was anticipating anything like those results.
While the media was busy composing its account of his great fall, Netanyahu was in the field, waging the campaign of his life. This effort included more than just interviews and posts on his Facebook page, attacking the publisher of Yedioth Aharonoth, Noni Mozes, relentlessly and escalating his war against the powerful newspaper. He also waged a successful ground campaign beneath the radar of both the media and the Zionist Camp, which was caught in a state of smug complacency and therefore left startled by the actual gap.
Apparently, Netanyahu realized that he could increase the gap between him and Herzog through Bennett’s seats, so he went personally to the strongholds of the ideological right in religious Zionist camp, and when he could not show up in person, he sent his proxy, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. Ya’alon plowed through the pre-military (religious) academies dominated by Bennett, and succeeded in instilling a sense of emergency over a potential rise by the left. Even Bennett himself was conflicted. On one hand, he recognized that if Netanyahu lost, his own HaBayit HaYehudi would be sent to the opposition benches too. On the other hand, he saw his pool of seats emptying right before his eyes.
The results of these elections indicate that the Israeli public has made a clear decision. It voted for a nationalist government with a conservative economic agenda. It is a government that Netanyahu can probably cobble together quite easily. Paradoxically, in his victory speech, the prime minister chose not mention Iran or the Islamic State. Instead he focused on the socioeconomic tasks that lie ahead of him. His remarks were intended for the head of Kulanu, Moshe Kahlon. After all, without his 10 seats, Netanyahu cannot form a new government. Kahlon now bears the hefty responsibility of being the social conscience of Netanyahu’s fourth term.
After being so thoroughly eulogized, Netanyahu will be spending the next few days putting together a new government. While the results are known, they leave one resounding question: How could the media have been so blind?
Why the Media Always Get Israeli Elections Wrong
The electoral system is so brutally complex that even voters don’t often understand it.
By Jonathan Schanzer, Politico magazine
March 18, 2015
The era of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [is] coming to an end,” read one Reuters headline. Similarly, Slate declared Netanyahu to be “Israel’s Sore Loser,” explaining that “he has botched his re-election the same way he has botched everything else.” Hundreds of other news items and analytical articles in recent weeks prophesied the demise of Israel’s embattled prime minister.
Today, of course, a triumphant Netanyahu is laying plans for a new government, and the media should be asking themselves why they tend to make the same sort of Dewey-Defeats-Truman mistakes, cycle after cycle, about Israeli elections. During the last round in 2013, the New Yorker’s David Remnick proclaimed that “the story of the election is the implosion of the center-left and the vivid and growing strength of the radical right.” Remnick was not alone, either. Pundits across the board predicted the meteoric rise of right-wing politician Naftali Bennett. Indeed, this was going to be the “Darth Bennett” government. In the end, Bennett’s party, Jewish Home, mustered only 12 seats in the Knesset, while centrist Yair Lapid played a far more pivotal role in the formation of Netanyahu’s government.
It’s a small consolation, perhaps, that observers outside of Israel aren’t the only ones who often can’t predict what the political system there will do. Israeli experts often get their predictions badly wrong too. A lot of that has to do with polling data that doesn’t ever tell the full picture. But there is a lot more to it than that.
Western analysts often view the Israeli parliamentary system through the prism of our own very different system and turn it into a binary equation. We vote blue or we vote red. We vote for one politician or the other. Undecided voters ultimately weigh their priorities and vote their conscience.
But that’s checkers, while Israeli voters and politicians must play chess. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that Israeli voters don’t always fully appreciate the implication of the voting game they’re playing. Every vote in their multi-party system is a rather grueling gambit. If they vote for the party they truly like and support, they may not get the government they desire. For example, for those who support the peace process, a vote for the leftist Meretz party might mean fewer seats for the center-left Labor party’s Isaac Herzog, who is the Israeli politician with arguably the best chance of jump-starting diplomacy. Similarly, for security hawks, a vote for rightist politician Avigdor Liberman might mean fewer seats for Netanyahu and his center-right Likud party, which is best suited to pursue a security agenda. Netanyahu himself appeared to be playing this game very late on election day Tuesday, when he posted a warning on Facebook that Likud needed to peel away allegiance from the smaller right-wing parties.
Israeli voters understand this dynamic. They are aware that their votes have consequences well beyond the simple numbers of seats each party gains. But it is impossible for them to foresee how their votes will impact the final tally. They simply cannot know what impact their vote will have on the ultimate composition of the government. It is for this reason that an estimated 10 percent of Israeli voters are undecided on the day of elections. One could argue that Israeli voters are undecided even after they cast a ballot.
The complexity of the Israeli system has often prompted pollsters to ask two key questions ahead of elections: Which party will you vote for? And who do you want to see as prime minister? The answer is not always the same. And this was apparently one of the indicators that gave Team Netanyahu hope, even as the eulogies for the prime minister began to appear in high-profile publication after publication. Indeed, fortunes can change overnight for Israeli politicians. And in this case, they did.
The Israeli system has not always been this way. The Israelis, between 1996 and 2003, experimented with a system whereby voters could cast one ballot for their prime minister and another for their party. But as my colleague Emanuele Ottolenghi explains, this encouraged ticket-splitting. “Many voters rejected Labor and Likud Knesset candidates, opting instead for smaller parties with sharper issue profiles, leaving the two big parties with less bargaining power than ever.” The system created inherently unstable governments, so lawmakers reverted to the one vote system, making it somewhat easier for the bigger vote-getters to bring together the 61 out of 120 Knesset seats to form a government.
The revised system hasn’t exactly made things more stable in recent years. We continue to watch governments crumble every two years—short of a full four-year term—because of intra-coalition squabbles.
But even coalition politics appears to be lost on Western observers. As polls showed that Netanyahu’s numbers were flagging, and the premature schadenfreude began to build, analysts failed to note that Netanyahu could lose the battle by failing to gain the most seats but still win the war by being in a position to pull together enough right-wing coalition members from other parties for Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to assign him the task of forming a government.
Despite a herd mentality that has produced two straight elections’ worth of failed analysis, few have had the integrity to admit they were wrong. Business Insider’s Armin Rosen is a rare breed. As the results trickled in, he admitted on Twitter, “Man, I wrote some profoundly wrong [stuff] about the Israeli election today.”
As Netanyahu sets out to build his new government—one that could just as easily include or exclude parties from the left–we are reminded there are just too many reasons not to put our trust in Israeli polls and predictions. Yet the media’s familiarity with Israel’s open system has bred a false sense of understanding, which is sometimes exacerbated by flawed polls. And, in the case of Netanyahu, who is roundly loathed by the American left, that lack of understanding could very easily be influenced by contempt and hope for his demise.
Editors should be cringing at what passed for news last week. Maybe a few corrections will be issued. Perhaps a few clarifications, too. But if there’s takeaway for them, it is this: The biennial “Running of the Israel Experts” is dangerous. Many get gored. Few walk away without a scratch. And even fewer seem to understand very well how the Israeli electoral system works.
One of them, perhaps, is Bibi Netanyahu.
Jonathan Schanzer is vice-president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Netanyahu’s shock re-election leaves Israel’s pollsters red-faced
* Israeli pollsters try to explain poor forecasts
* Predictions for a centre-left victory proved wrong
* Cultural, technical obstacles thwart surveys
By Dan Williams, Reuters
March 18 2015
JERUSALEM – Embarrassed at failing to predict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s election victory, Israeli pollsters said on Wednesday they were blindsided by reticent rightist voters and may have unwittingly prodded waverers to back the incumbent.
Netanyahu’s Likud won 30 of parliament’s 120 seats in Tuesday’s ballot, against 24 for the centre-left Zionist Union – upsetting opinion surveys that as recently as Friday gave the challenger a four-seat lead.
Exit polls also proved unreliable. Israel’s top three television stations, airing first returns as voting booths closed, found the parties close or tied. Had that been borne out, either could have potentially headed the next government.
Instead, during overnight counting, Likud’s tally went from 27 seats to 30 and the Zionist Union’s from 27 to 24.
Grilled on the discrepancy, Channel 2 TV’s veteran pollster Mina Tzemach said many Likud voters declined to take part in replicating their vote in the dummy ballot boxes set up by survey-taking companies outside voting stations.
Even though exit polls are anonymous, she suggested such reticence might have cultural roots for Israelis originally from countries with different political regimes in which they worry about sharing their private voting choices.
“In certain voting stations, voting stations in places where there are a lot of new immigrants, pro-Likud ballot boxes, the percent of those who voted (in the exit polls) was especially low,” Tzemach told Israel’s Army Radio.
Fellow survey-taker Camil Fuchs agreed, saying final counts from voting stations he had monitored showed that a significant number of Likud supporters had not participated in exit polls.
If they did participate, they may also not have been honest about the way they voted and as exit polls close earlier than the real polls, a last-minute surge in Likud votes, in response to a call from Netanyahu, may have been missed, he said.
“Some people don’t say (in exit polls) what they really voted, and the exit polls close about two hours before the voting booths,” Fuchs told Israel Radio.
Israeli election forecasts have been wrong before – in 1981, when the Likud narrowly won; in 1992 about the return to left-wing Labour party rule; and in 1996, when Netanyahu toppled Labour incumbent Shimon Peres for his first term in office.
Recent reliance on Internet-based studies has thrown another spanner in the works, according to Avi Degani, an Israeli pollster who says he conducted telephone surveys exclusively. Since last month, he has been the only one consistently predicting a victory for Netanyahu.
Degani said Web-based “panels,” made up of tens of thousands of pre-selected respondents, rarely reflect Israeli society accurately as they favour the tech-savvy, educated and urbane.
“The Internet does not represent the State of Israel or the people of Israel. (It is) biased strongly toward Tel Aviv,” Degani told reporters in a conference call arranged by the Israel Project advocacy group, referring to Israel’s second largest city and financial capital.
“People who are in the periphery … and have a stronger tendency to vote Likud are, I think, very poorly represented.”
In separate remarks to Reuters, Degani said Israeli pollsters were always bedevilled by some 30 percent of citizens whose votes are unknowable – either because they waver until the last minute or end up backing fringe parties that do not muster enough support to enter parliament and are nixed from the tally.
“We are talking about 20 parliament seats that could go either way. It is almost impossible to tackle statistically.”
Still, Degani said he anticipated Netanyahu’s win by finding that at least half of wavering voters would choose Likud, adding that some of those respondents viewed themselves as rallying against Zionist Union’s strong showing in opinion polls.
“It is a highly emotional matter in Israel, and the Likud had the added advantage of being the last party, with the possible exception of (liberal) Meretz, of having a defined ideology. The rest are just about personalities,” Degani said.
How did the polls in Israel get it so wrong?
By Batsheva Sobelman and Laura King, LA Times
March 18, 2015
How did the pollsters get it so wrong?
After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confounded predictions he could go down to defeat and instead scored a solid election win, some of those who conducted the opinion polls sought Wednesday to explain the dynamics involved in the bad calls.
The upshot: It’s complicated.
A week ago, opinion polls began to show Netanyahu’s conservative Likud lagging behind the center-left opposition party of Isaac Herzog. Two days later, in the final surveys allowed under election rules to be published before the Tuesday vote, the gap appeared to have widened, with Herzog’s Zionist Union expected to best Likud by five parliamentary seats.
But pollsters noted that those late-in-the-campaign polls were clouded by large numbers of undecided voters – as many as 20% of those surveyed, by some counts. Netanyahu, who until last week had done almost no direct campaigning, engaged in a blitz of interviews and appearances in the days before the vote, apparently managing to draw off support from far-right parties with tough talk about the Palestinians and external threats to Israel.
As soon as balloting ended Tuesday night, exit polls commissioned by the major Israeli television channels were released. All pegged the race as a virtual tie – a result proved seriously off-base after the all-night vote count.
Pollster Avi Degani, the founder of the Geocartography polling agency, said he was surprised by the degree of divergence between prediction and reality, but at the same time recognized it beforehand as “a possibility.”
An overnight swing during the vote-counting is not unprecedented, including in races involving Netanyahu: In 1996, when he was running against veteran Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, the electorate – as a Hebrew-language catchphrase goes — “went to sleep with Peres and woke up with Bibi.”
How people vote can sometimes be more a matter of sentiment than science, said pollster Degani.
“In elections, everything is very emotional, particularly in Israel where you don’t have two parties like in the U.S., but many parties, some that are here today and gone tomorrow, but still get votes,” he said. “At the last moment, many votes get lost and the remaining ones get redistributed.”
One important factor: The public is not always truthful with pollsters, especially in a crowded field of contenders in which people might have an attachment to one party, but vote for another for pragmatic reasons.
Statistician Mano Geva of the Midgam polling organization said in a television interview that published polls can end up affecting results, because people make strategic decisions based on them. Some voters, for example, might decide to support a major faction that could have more clout than a small one in danger of oblivion in a system that requires a party to win 3.25% of the vote to gain seats in parliament.
Netanyahu’s last-minute campaigning, featuring an array of strident accusations, may have deepened the rifts in Israeli society, but it also galvanized his traditional base.
In the last days and hours before the vote, Degani said, many long-term but wavering Likud supporters “got scared the left would win, and came back home.”
Sobelman is a special correspondent and King a staff writer.
Israeli election results: How did Benjamin Netanyahu pull off surprise victory?
The prime minister’s campaign turned his vulnerability into an asset, targeting Right-wing voters who had abandoned Likud for other parties positioned even further along the hardline spectrum
By David Blair, The Telegraph
18 March 2015
Inside a modest office block on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, the strategists of Likud campaign headquarters masterminded the political rebirth of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Only five days ago, the Israeli prime minister seemed a lost leader. Mr Netanyahu had tried four different campaign slogans – while the voters kept turning away. Last Friday, a raft of opinion polls placed Likud four or five seats behind Zionist Union, a Left-wing alliance.
Damaged by a series of revelations about his extravagant use of public money on official residences, Mr Netanyahu’s defeat seemed inevitable. Ordinary Israelis, worried by the cost of living and a desperate shortage of affordable housing, seemed unimpressed by his fixation on the threat from distant Iran.
Somehow, Likud had not even managed to write an election manifesto. Surveying the apparent shipwreck, Mitchell Barak, a leading Israeli pollster, described Mr Netanyahu’s campaign as the “worst anywhere”.
In the days that followed, everything changed. Aron Shaviv, the prime minister’s chief strategist and a veteran of election campaigns everywhere from Thailand to Kenya, decided on a high risk approach.
Instead of glossing over Mr Netanyahu’s troubles, he would make them Likud’s central theme. Rather than downplay the chances of his candidate’s defeat, Mr Shaviv would remind voters at every turn that the man they know as ‘Bibi’ really might lose.
The aim was to make a virtue of Mr Netanyahu’s vulnerability and the target audience was Right-wing voters who had abandoned Likud for various parties positioned even further along the hardline spectrum, notably Jewish Home led by Naftali Bennett.
“Too many Right-wing voters felt too comfortable that Netanyahu would win,” explained Mr Shaviv. They felt that it was safe to back Mr Bennett, sure in the knowledge that “Bibi” would stay as prime minister as part of the package.
So Mr Shaviv sought to “reverse the package deal”. The Likud message became this: if Mr Netanyahu stays, then Jewish Home and other hardliners would be in his coalition anyway.
But if Right-wingers failed to vote for “Bibi”, then he would be out and the Left would win. The final Likud slogan was stark: “It’s Us or the Left: only Netanyahu, only Likud.”
During the last 72 hours of campaigning, Mr Netanyahu did his utmost to ease the path of Right-wingers back to Likud.
He revived his opposition to a Palestinian state and accused the Left of ganging up with Israel’s Arab minority, comprising 20 per cent of the population.
On polling day, he declared that the “Right-wing government is in danger” – and the Left was “bussing in Arabs to vote”.
As votes were cast on Tuesday, Likud believed this message had struck home. In the nerve centre of the party’s campaign, six men and one woman sat at a table strewn with coke bottles and discarded fast food wrappings.
They faced a bank of TV screens and a map of Israel showing the membership of every Likud branch.
All around were campaign posters showing Mr Netanyahu aiming an accusing glare at Right-wing voters.
Mr Shaviv, the architect of a strategy based upon stressing his candidate’s political frailty, had every confidence that it would work. “I expect that Netanyahu will form the next government, a Right-wing government with Right-wing parties,” he said.
And so it proved: when the results came in, the prime minister had turned the polls on their head. Instead of being five seats behind his opponents, he was five seats ahead. At a stroke, Mr Netanyahu had achieved his own political resurrection – with a bit of help from Mr Shaviv.