Rehovot, usually Israel’s Ohio, narrowly favors Blue and White this time

An analysis based on the Central Elections Committee data has found that the country’s 50 wealthiest municipalities chose Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party over Likud by a significant margin. Tel Aviv gave 46 percent of its vote to Blue and White and only 19% to Likud, and the upper-middle class town of Ramat Hasharon giving 55.5% to Blue and White and only 17% to Likud, according to the Hebrew report by the Haaretz newspaper.

In Rehovot, a middle-class, but not upper-middle class town of 140,000 known as “Israel’s Ohio” because it has voted for various parties in similar percentages to the entire country over the last decade, Likud and Blue and White received almost the same percentage of the vote, but with Blue and White edging out Likud 30% to 29%. (In the country as a whole, Likud and Blue and White nearly tied, with Likud garnering 26.83% of votes and Blue and White earning 26.47%.)

Rehovot is thought to be an accurate predictor of election outcomes because of the diversity of its Jewish population (it does not predict votes for Arab parties as only a small number of Israeli Arabs live there). Within a range of several blocks, one can find ultra-Orthodox, national religious and secular Jews, graduate students and pensioners, as well as immigrant communities from Ethiopia, the United States, Yemen and the former Soviet Union.

But it now seems that Rehovot has shifted ever so slightly to the left, or perhaps the country as a whole has shifted rightward.

Rehovot’s results were indeed close to those nationally but not spot-on. The Labor Party garnered 4.7% of the vote in Rehovot and 4.53% nationally, according to the most updated results. Yisrael Beytenu got 4% of Rehovot voters votes and 4% nationally.

The Union of Right-Wing Parties did better in Rehovot than nationally, with 5.2% of residents of the city giving the national religious settler-affiliated party their votes, while only 3.8% did so nationally. Meanwhile, the two ultra-Orthodox parties did better nationally than they did in Rehovot. United Torah Judaism got 4% percent of the vote in Rehovot and 5.85% nationally, while Shas received 5.3% of the vote in Rehovot and 6% nationally.

Moshe Kahlon’s center-right Kulanu party, which billed itself as “the sane right,” earned 4.2 % of the vote in Rehovot, while garnering only 3.6 % nationwide. 

Meretz attained 3.1% of the vote in Rehovot and 3.7% nationwide. The New Right won 3.6 % of votes in Rehovot and 3.26 % of votes nationwide, although this figure remains up in the air.

Of those eligible to vote in the city, 69.4% showed up at the polls while the national figure was 67.47%