The big news this week is that the chairman of the New Hope Party, Gideon Saar, has hired the services of the four top American campaign strategists behind the Lincoln Project to help him with his run for prime minister. The Lincoln Project waged a highly effective campaign to remove President Donald Trump from office in the November 2020 US election. During the campaign, the four former Republican strategists — Steve Schmidt, Stuart Stevens, Reed Galen and Rick Wilson — used sophisticated strategies to convince moderate Republican voters that Trump doesn’t represent them or the values of the Republican Party. Now it looks like Saar is trying to do the same thing in the upcoming Israeli election.

It's certainly not the first time that American political strategists have featured in Israeli elections. They have enormous experience campaigning in the many elections that take place across a county as vast as the United States. One of these consultants was Arthur Finkelstein, who advised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his 1996 run against late President Shimon Peres. Much of Netanyahu’s victory was attributed to Finkelstein and the advertising revolution he instigated, which included a creative negative TV ad campaign. It was new to Israel and the Peres campaign had no way to counter it.

Three years later, in 1999, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak hired the services of American consultant Stanley Greenberg. Greenberg had experience countering Finkelstein’s campaigns and helped put Barak in the prime minister’s office. Then there was Mark Mellman, the man behind Yesh Atid chair Yair Lapid’s successful run in 2013, in which he won 19 seats. His campaign focused on one concern: the needs of the middle class. 

And yet there is something different about Saar and the Lincoln Project. Likud voters who feel that Netanyahu doesn’t represent their party’s values anymore need a new home, which is what his New Hope party offers. As of now, its support in the polls comes mainly from center-left voters who would vote for any candidate who poses a genuine threat to Netanyahu.