Method
What four new polls did to the forecast
We nearly doubled the 2026 poll count this week. Here is exactly how much it moved, which is less than you would guess and in a direction worth knowing.
This week the 2026 poll corpus went from 191 polls to 290, and from nine pollsters to twelve. Two things caused it: four genuinely new polls filed between 17 and 19 August, and a second source we had not been reading — the Wikipedia compilation for this cycle, which turns out to publish a sample-size column no earlier page has.
The honest question is what that bought. Here is the whole of it.
| 191 polls | 290 polls | |
|---|---|---|
| Mean 90% interval | 7.67 seats | 7.32 seats |
| Likud | 24.25 | 23.30 |
| Netanyahu bloc | 53.1 | 52.0 |
| Netanyahu P(≥61) | 7.1% | 5.0% |
| Opposition P(≥61) | 17.6% | 19.1% |
Intervals tightened by 4.6%. Likud lost about a seat. The Netanyahu bloc’s path to a majority narrowed from 7.1% to 5.0%.
Why this is not a bigger number
More data tightens a forecast roughly as the square root of how much you add, and only when the new data is independent of what you already had. A good deal of the Wikipedia material describes the same fieldwork the compilation already recorded, so the effective gain is smaller than “99 more polls” suggests.
It is also worth saying what did not change: nothing at all in the backtest. The five settled elections gained no polls, so every historical score is identical to six decimal places. New data landed entirely on an election that has not happened yet, which means we cannot score it until 27 October. Anyone telling you that more data has made their model measurably better, without a held-out election to prove it on, is telling you about their intentions.
The correction we nearly missed
The compilation does not only grow — it revises. Sixty-two lines of what we had already committed were rewritten, including one Filber poll from 25 June that had been recorded with only 115 of 120 seats allocated and now carries the missing Ra’am row.
That is why every snapshot we hold is dated rather than overwritten. Had we simply refetched the file, the forecast would have silently changed and the version any earlier forecast was built from would be gone.