ABSTRACT
Throughout the 2015 elections campaign, polls have predicted that the Likud party would gain between nineteen and twenty-four Knesset seats. The last polls, published fi ve days before Election Day, predicted that Likud would gain twenty-one seats. In the end, the party had won thirty seats on Election Day. Most pollsters and commentators agree that this gap between public opinion polls and the actual ballot stems not from errors in the polls, but from shifts in the electorate toward Likud party in the last days of the campaign, especially, shifts from other right-wing parties. How did the Likud gain (at least) six Knesset seats in fi ve days? Many attribute this shift in voting to the things Netanyahu said on Election Day about the Arab voters. In this chapter, I propose another explanation, tying the shift toward the Likud party among right-wing voters to perceptions of media bias and media infl uence.
