"The Israeli Ohio" is back on top: The cities that predicted the election results

It is considered "the Ohio of Israel" - but it is not the only city where the election results are similar to those in the country as a whole: less than two months before the elections, an analysis by the company Madlan - based on the 2022 election results in every city with more than 50,000 residents - shows that Rehovot is once again the city where the similarity to the results in Israel as a whole is the greatest.

And Rehovot is not alone. Alongside it, in Petah Tikva, Haifa, Hadera, Netanya, Holon, and Rosh HaAyin, the similarity was great between the results there and those in the general elections - after which the "full-on" right-wing government rose, which survived a full term despite the October 7 massacre. On the other side of the table are mainly ultra-Orthodox and Arab cities.

The top-ranking cities

Like the neighborhood analysis, which showed that the center of Rehovot is the neighborhood most similar to the results in Israel as a whole, the city considered to be the predictor of election results is also in first place. In Rehovot, as in all the cities in the top ten except Haifa, there is almost no Arab population and therefore the voting rate for Arab parties is negligible, but apart from that, its demographics lead to the fact that the percentage of voting for the various parties is very similar to that in Israel as a whole.

Thus, for example, in Rehovot 25.7% voted for Likud compared to 23.4% in the whole country, 23.1% chose Yesh Atid (versus 17.8% in the whole country), 13% put the Religious Zionism ballot in the box (10.6% in Israel), and 10.5% the National Unity (9% in the whole country). The gaps in the voting percentages for Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu, Labor, and Meretz are even smaller - less than a percent. In total, the average difference between the voting percentage in Rehovot and Israel as a whole for the 13 parties that received the highest number of votes in those elections is very low and indicates great similarity - 2.05 percentage points.

Rehovot, as mentioned, has been called "the Israeli Ohio" for years. The state of Ohio in the Midwest voted for the winner in the US presidential elections consecutively from 1964 to 2016. It was considered a swing state all those years, and the streak was broken only when the majority of its voters chose Donald Trump in 2020 - but Joe Biden was elected as the 46th president. Like it, Rehovot was considered for years to be the city whose results predict the identity of the winner in Israel as a whole, but the streak of elections at the end of the last decade and the beginning of the current one without a clear winner put an end to this statement as well.

After Rehovot on the list is Petah Tikva, where the voting percentages for Likud were higher (28.4%) and those for Yesh Atid were lower (19.7%) and closer to the general rate. In Haifa - the only city in the top ten similar cities where Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid beat Likud (26.3% versus 20.9%) - Hadash-Ta'al received 5.7%, more than the national voting rate. The Sharon cities of Hadera and Netanya round out the top five, and there Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud received more than 35% (in Hadera even 38%), but there is a very great similarity in the voting rate for other parties.

In Hadera, there is a gap of less than a percent in support in the city compared to that in the country as a whole for Yesh Atid, National Unity, Religious Zionism, and Shas - the four parties that received the highest number of votes after Likud. In Netanya, Yesh Atid received 17.4%, a gap of less than half a percent only relative to Israel as a whole. Among those 10 similar cities, Rosh HaAyin is the city where the voting rate was the highest for Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir's Religious Zionism - 14.8% - largely because of the relatively large religious population in the city. On the other hand, in Rosh HaAyin there was also the highest voting rate for Benny Gantz's National Unity, a resident of the city - 14%.

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The Israel of the middle

In the two largest cities in the country, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the results were far from being similar to the national ones. In Jerusalem, United Torah Judaism was the largest party in 2022 and Shas received 2.5 times more votes than Yesh Atid, in Tel Aviv Yesh Atid received almost 2 times more votes than Likud while Meretz, which did not pass the electoral threshold, was almost the third largest party. They are ranked 28th (Tel Aviv) and 29th (Jerusalem) on the list, before Hod HaSharon, where the voting rate for Yesh Atid was the highest among the cities tested - 40.4%.

The seven cities that, according to the analysis, the level of similarity between the results in them and those in Israel as a whole is considered "very different" are all ultra-Orthodox and Arab. In Elad, almost half of the population voted for Shas and 35% chose United Torah Judaism, in Bnei Brak and Beitar Illit 59% chose the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi party and 30% for the Sephardic Shas, while in Modi'in Illit 77.4% put Gimmel in the ballot box - compared to 6% in Israel as a whole who chose United Torah Judaism. It is in the second to last place on the similarity list, while the most different of all among those with more than 50,000 residents is Umm al-Fahm - 40.5% chose Hadash-Ta'al there, 37.8% Balad, 17.5% Ra'am - and less than 5% for all the Jewish parties.

Tal Koppel, CEO of Madlan, details: "In each of the cities that vote similarly to the real results, there is 'a little of everything': Likud around the national average, Yesh Atid, Religious Zionism, Shas, ultra-Orthodox, left - and no block swallows the rest. For comparison, the cities at the bottom of the ranking are precisely those with a distinct sectoral identity: Jerusalem (United Torah Judaism), Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Ra'anana, and Kfar Saba (Yesh Atid and center-left), Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, and Tiberias (Shas and traditional-religious), Acre, Lod, and Ramle (mixed cities, Jews-Arabs). The cities that vote 'like Israel' are exactly the cities where there is no one sectoral majority."

He noted that "we see that these are medium-large cities, old, in the center and on the coastal plain - not in the core of a block and not in the extreme periphery. They are also not the richest cities and not the most disadvantaged, meaning the Israel of the middle, the geographical and class center of the country. In short, the cities that vote like Israel are exactly the cities that are Israel in miniature."