Candidates weren't the only ones anxious to know the outcome of Tuesday's Arkansas primary elections.
So, too, was a relatively new player in this state's elections, Common Ground Arkansas.
What Common Ground Arkansas is not, is a political party. What it is, according to its founder, is an independent organization intent upon putting "people over politics."
This year's primaries were the first to test the organization's potential impact.
Jim Hendren, a Republican-turned-independent state senator from Benton County, founded Common Ground Arkansas more than a year ago. That's also when he shucked the partisan label he had worn into public office decades ago.
In 1994, Hendren won his first term in the Arkansas House of Representatives, defeating the last Democratic legislator to have been elected from Benton County.
The Republican Party has since been firmly planted in Benton County and eventually spread to the rest of what had once been a solidly Democratic state.
The numbers of Republicans seeking local office in this state now is strong evidence of just how widespread that change has become.
This year, according to Common Ground Arkansas' calculation, there were 1,990 candidates for county office in Arkansas. Of them, 68 percent are Republicans, 23 percent Democrats and 9 percent independents. In fact, the majority of county candidates in 57 of Arkansas' 75 counties are Republicans.
Notably, Hendren served in the House for six years and moved on to the state Senate in 2013. His colleagues elected him president pro tempore for the current term. However, quitting the Republican Party cost him his leadership role. Although he pondered an independent bid for governor, Hendren chose to focus instead on Common Ground Arkansas and this mission of putting people over politics.
The reason for citing his personal history with the Legislature is to underscore that Hendren knows whereof he speaks when he says the state's lawmakers have become much more partisan than what he knows the Arkansas people to be.
He has watched from inside government as Republican and Democratic officeholders have become ever more partisan, largely because extremists have controlled the outcome of party primaries.
As Hendren noted, with just 15 percent of eligible voters turning out for a primary election, as few as 8 percent or so of eligible voters are actually making decisions for everyone. Many political races simply have no general election contest. Whatever happened in the primary set the direction, period.
In the most recent years, with Republicans in clear control of the Legislature, a lot of those primaries have been between the most extreme among Republicans and those who are less so.
That fact prompted encouragement from some political activists for Arkansas voters to choose this year to vote in the Republican primary, regardless of political affiliation, because that's where many critical races were being decided.
Among those activists was Archie Schaffer III of Fayetteville, a self-described political independent and a board member of Common Ground Arkansas. He wrote for the Democrat-Gazette recently that he believes "hyperpartisanship and a refusal to try and find common ground, from both ends of the political spectrum, is destroying democracy in America."
"Continuing to have people run either as far to the left to get the Democrat nomination or as hard to the right to get the Republican nomination must stop," Schaffer wrote.
He said he would vote this year in the Republican primary because that is where the vast majority of important decisions would be made.
Benny Petrus, who was the Democratic speaker of the Arkansas House of Representatives from 2006 to 2008 but doesn't consider himself either a Democrat or Republican now, made similar arguments in another opinion piece for the Democrat-Gazette.
He encouraged voters to refill "the center," which is where compromise used to happen.
Such commentary, full-page newspaper ads explaining Common Ground Arkansas' purpose and identifying a half dozen "problem-solving" candidates, most of them from Northwest Arkansas, plus a website (commongroundar.org) chock full of voter information introduced the organization and its intent to voters.
Asked before the votes were being counted this week to define success for the organization, Hendren saw it in early voting numbers.
A key goal had been to increase turnout in the primaries, particularly in Northwest Arkansas' Republican primaries, where so many races were to be decided this year.
In Benton and Washington counties, he said, the early voting numbers had literally doubled.
Did it matter? We'll know that when all the votes, including those in any upcoming runoffs, are tallied and analyzed.
Nevertheless, Common Ground Arkansas certainly seems to have real potential to influence future elections.