Gabbay meets with top US Democrat strategists ahead of 2019 elections
Pollster Jim Gerstein is an expert on the voting preferences of US Jewish voters and has worked with media expert David Eichenbaum on Israeli campaigns in the past
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Labor Party chairman Avi Gabbay has met with two top US election strategists, amid talk of early-2019 elections, it was reported Tuesday.
According to the Walla news site, Jim Gerstein and David Eichenbaum, top pollsters for the Democratic party, first met with Gabbay when he was in Washington, DC earlier this year for the AIPAC conference, with a second meeting taking place last week in Israel.
Israeli governments rarely last their full terms, as coalition partners find reasons to squabble in the lead-up to election years as each party seeks to differentiate itself to the voters.
If the Knesset dissolves itself during the fall session, the mandatory three-month campaign season means no elections are likely before the spring of 2019.
Gerstein worked with former prime minister Ehud Barak on his 1999 election campaign, and Eichenbaum advised former defense minister and ex-IDF chief Shaul Mofaz and the Kadima Party in the 2012 elections.
Gerstein is considered to be an expert in the field of voting preferences of US Jewish voters.
According to the website of his strategy firm, Eichenbaum has worked for 15 years as a media specialist for the Democrats, as well as working as a campaign manager and press secretary on US Senate races.
In 2015 Eichenbaum advised on strategy and wrote advertisements for the campaign in the US in favor of the nuclear agreement with Iran, which US President Donald Trump withdrew from in May.
The two worked on the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidential campaigns, and in 2015 were both reportedly involved in an initiative by Israeli campaign strategist Eyal Arad to try to replace the Netanyahu government.
Netanyahu was the first to bring American strategists to the Israeli political scene, with conservative campaign strategist Arthur Finkelstein widely credited with bringing him to power for the first time.
Finkelstein led Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign and was behind the “Peres will divide Jerusalem” slogan that helped Netanyahu overcome Shimon Peres, who had been forecast to sweep to power in the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin the previous November.
That election was credited with changing the tone of Israeli campaigns, bringing more American-style, aggressive, and negative campaigning to Israel.
The Times of Israel Community.