Nine seats separate two Israeli pollsters on Likud, and a US think tank now supplies the average
Channel 13 put Likud at 18 on 16 September, its lowest in recent polling; i24NEWS–Direct Polls had it at 27 a week earlier. On 18 September the Middle East Forum launched a poll-of-polls campaign coverage will quote.
A Channel 13 poll published on Wednesday 16 September, reported by Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, gave the Netanyahu bloc 54 seats to 52 for the bloc around Gadi Eisenkot, with Yashar the largest single party on 22 and Likud down to 18 — one fewer than the previous poll and, per Haaretz, its lowest recent tally. The Post framed the same numbers as Netanyahu narrowing the gap. Read against the month, the series moves: Channel 12 had Likud at 22 on 6 September and 21 on 8 September, with Yashar at 25 and the Eisenkot bloc on 57 to Netanyahu’s 52. On 9 September five polls landed in one night; i24NEWS–Direct Polls was the outlier, giving Likud 27 and Yashar 22, with the blocs tied at 52. The vote must be held by 27 October.
On 18 September the Middle East Forum, a US advocacy think tank, opened a public Israeli poll-of-polls, its average as of 17 September showing Yashar 24, Likud 23, Together 12, The Democrats 10, and the Joint List, Otzma Yehudit, Shas, United Torah Judaism and Yisrael Beytenu on eight each, with Religious Zionism and Zehut on six. Beneath the numbers, Haaretz reported on 17 September that Netanyahu is working to shift roughly seven seats from the opposition bloc to Likud by courting centrist voters while Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose Otzma Yehudit is slipping, positions himself as patron of the right; Ben-Gvir was photographed campaigning at Tel Aviv’s Hatikva Market on 18 September. Two disqualification petitions filed on 14 September — Likud against Mansour Abbas’s United Arab List, Otzma Yehudit against the Democrats — remain unresolved before the Central Elections Committee, chaired by Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg.
Assessment: An average that folds a 27-seat Likud in with an 18-seat Likud conceals the only genuinely informative fact in the polling file: the two pollsters are not measuring the same electorate, and one of them is nine seats wrong. That is the story, not the mean. Note also who is now doing the folding. A foreign advocacy organisation has positioned itself as the arithmetic of record three weeks from a vote, and campaign coverage that quotes a seat-average rarely names the house effects inside it. Yom Kippur will freeze the flow for roughly 25 hours; the last pre-fast numbers will sit unchallenged longer than usual.