Obscured by the headlines generated Wednesday by poll figures suggesting Benny Gantz’s candidacy now poses a genuine prime ministerial challenge to Benjamin Netanyahu was the same surveys’ indication that the Labor party is edging toward extinction.

Gantz’s Israel Resilience Party reacted to the surveys with sensible skepticism, saying it was “not ecstatic over upturns nor worried about downturns. The public will decide.”

Indeed, the public will. And the pollsters’ track record in predicting those decisions is not exactly stellar. Pollsters got the last US presidential elections wrong, and they were dealing with just two candidates. Their Israeli counterparts have to factor in dozens of parties, and deal with the complications posed by a pure proportional representation system, with a complex 3.25% minimum threshold mechanism. Not to mention the fact that Israeli voters may not, shock, always tell the pollsters the truth. And that surveys are often carried out in immense haste, with fairly small samples, and consequent fairly large margins of error.

Read More at Times of Israel.