With Obama’s campaign people working things in Israel leading up to the election, I wonder if the pre-election polls were intentionally skewed to predict a loss for Netanyahu.
-PJ
No, I don’t think they were. Both Netanyahu and his party Likud were really worried. It looked like Likud was getting ready to throw him out of the leadership position if he lost. I even heard that Netanyahu told some in the party that he would resign if he got below a certain threshold of seats (I think it was “18”).
What Netanyahu did was to “pull out all stops” and radically changed his campaigning at the very end ... and he finally did pull votes from the Nationalists (in general) over to the Likud. Netanyahu went “all out” at the end.
They can't make the polls be an outright win for the Left, because voters will assume that they already won and not bother to vote. They have to keep it close so they can urge the undecided to join them. It works here with our low-information voters, but it didn't work over there.
-PJ