When the chairman of HaBayit HaYehudi, Minister of Education Naftali Bennett, entered the polling station on the morning of April 27, he was greeted by his supporters who shouted, "Who's there? The next prime minister!"

Accompanied by his wife Gilat, Bennett was there to vote in the primaries for his party's leadership. Bennett had initiated the early primaries, saying that HaBayit HaYehudi must be ready in the event of early elections. But beyond his desire to prepare the party for future possibilities, Bennett also wanted to hold sudden primaries in an effort to ensure that he would win another term as party head. He wanted to take advantage of there currently being no significant challenger. And indeed, the move proved to be a success. He swept the election with some 80% of the total votes. This means that for the third consecutive time, he will lead the party in the next election.

Two candidates ran against him. They were Jonathan Baranski, a reserve colonel, who lives in the settlement of Eli, and Yitzchak Zaga, a rabbi and economist. Both men claimed that Bennett had turned HaBayit HaYehudi into a fashionable momentary phenomenon, while obscuring its religious Zionist banner. While Bennett sees himself as leader of the right after the Benjamin Netanyahu era, Baranski and Zaga would rather preserve HaBayit HaYehudi as a sectoral party. In other words, they do not pretend to one day take control of the government. Just before the election on April 26, Baranski accused Bennett of "elegantly disassociating himself from the true path of religious Zionism."

Baranski announced his decision to run against Bennett in an interview with the Mako website April 20, saying, "I felt as if the way the party's leadership had disassociated itself from the values of religious Zionism made it impossible for me to feel at home there." He then criticized the way that HaBayit HaYehudi allowed for the creation of a separate prayer space for Reform Jews at the Western Wall and ignored the issue of the Amona outpost, which was evacuated in February for illegally occupying private Palestinian lands.