In an interview at the Jerusalem Post Miami Summit, Mark Penn, one of America’s most influential pollsters and political strategists, Co-Chair of the conference, and Chairman and CEO of Stagwell, discussed his work polling in Israel over 40 years ago, why election polls are frequently inaccurate, and what polling about Israel reveals about Americans’ opinions about Israel.
Recalling his work on the election campaign of Menachem Begin in 1981, Stagwell said, “I received an assignment to do polling for Menachem Begin when we didn’t yet have the IBM PC. I built my own computer, programmed it, and brought it with me on the plane. After two hours of arguments with customs, I was allowed to bring it into Israel.”
Comparing the state of polling then to 2025, Penn says that Israel has state-of-the-art polling technology today, and mentioned NewVoices.ai, a product developed by Stagwell in Israel that can be used for polling humans and that can interact in sales, interviews, and appointments.
Despite the advances in AI in this field, Penn noted that humans are still required to decode and interpret the results. “AI can do all of the work and deliver results, but they still have to be analyzed by people.”
Penn explained that polls aren’t always accurate because people frequently change their minds. “I always say about Americans that they are absolutely positively definite about everything until they change their mind the next day,” he shared. “The truth of the matter is that people believe a lot of things that are in fact very contradictory, and every now and then they’re called to resolve those contradictory feelings.” While 80% of voters may make up their minds before an election, the last 20% remain undecided until the very end, he added.
Turning to polls in the US about Israel, Penn said that while polls in the US have shown support for Israel over Hamas by a ratio of 75-25, the disparity between the numbers is misleading. “Twenty-five is a huge number, and it was twenty, so it has crept up,” he says. “The problem is that while that while people over 60 will support Israel 90 to 10, people who are 18 to 24 are split right down the middle. They’re not very well informed. They couldn’t find Israel and Gaza on a map, but they have become a TikTok generation, and it is a considerable danger. The good news is that young people often change their minds as they become more educated.”
Speaking about the uses of new technology in market research, Penn said that while he doesn’t think that market research itself will change, other processes in marketing and advertising will become more advanced through technology that will work with natural language commands.
“For every new technology,” he concluded, “the most important thing is that it enables us to do new things that we never could do before. We are on the verge of a tremendous revolution, and I think people in Israel and my people are in the leadership of that revolution.”
Written in collaboration with Stagwell Group