Politicians don't usually lose any sleep over Tel Aviv on the eve of elections, as pundits can almost always predict how the city will vote. Tel Aviv is viewed as Israel’s most liberal city and it has historically given much support to Meretz and Labor. It is also very trendy. Middle-of-the-road and ephemeral parties have also gotten the city’s support, such as the Democratic Movement for Change (Dash) in 1977, Shinui headed by Yosef (Tommy) Lapid in 2003, the Pensioners of Israel in 2006 and of course Kadima that same year. Then there was Blue and White in April this year, with 45.7% of its voters from Israel’s first Hebrew city.

If we use the recent April elections as our guide, we can generalize that less than 5% of Tel Aviv voters vote for ultra-Orthodox parties; about 3% for the Arab List and about a quarter to the Likud and its satellite parties. Almost 70% vote for center-left parties in their various configurations.

But too few Tel Avivians vote. In the April elections, approximately 426,000 people were eligible to vote, but the number of voters was only 268,795 — a turnout of only 63.04%. That is about 8% less than the national average of 68.46%. For the right, this was good news, as Tel Aviv has one of the largest pools of center-left voters in the country. As far as the Likud is concerned, this is a great situation. The question is, why are the liberal parties not focusing on voter turnout?

In the upcoming do-over elections, the opposition has a much clearer goal than it had half a year ago. In the April elections, it strove to receives as many mandates as possible as the polls made it clear that a center-left government was not on the table. Therefore, the best bet was on a national unity government with Blue and White and the Likud in some kind of rotation. This time, the goal is clear: to prevent Netanyahu from attaining 61 mandates and bringing the right back to where it was in April. This time, Yisrael Beiteinu is willing to play the game much closer to the center of the map.