The midterm elections are tomorrow. You’ve heard all the punditry and proclamations that it’s the most important election of our lifetime. Straight Arrow News is here to help guide you through election night and track the results. Contributor Larry Lindsey is leading our team to help provide context for the big races in the House and Senate, and he says diversity is a key component in Tuesday’s election.

Straight Arrow News is doing something new this year to cover election night. My team and I – I’m Larry Lindsey – will be running the desk and reporting on returns as they come in and more importantly, trying to project what’s going to happen before races are actually called.

It’s going to be an exciting night. It starts around 7 p.m. Polls will be closed in Indiana, Georgia, Virginia and Florida. 

Georgia, as you probably know has a very tight Senate race between incumbent Senator Warnock and Herschel Walker, his challenger, who is a very famous football star. Race is tight, probably going to go to a runoff, but it will be closely watched.

There’s also an interesting Senate race and governor’s race in the state of Florida. The big attention will be on Ron DeSantis running for governor and probably the margin that he builds up. He is often spoken of as a 2024 Republican presidential nominee.

The races in Virginia and Indiana are focused on the U.S. House. And there’s an interesting strategy here that we want to examine that isn’t commonly discussed, and that’s the efforts by the Republican party to run a more diverse set of nominees. It seemed to have worked for them in 2020 and they’re going to try it again this year. 

So for example, there’s an African-American candidate running in Northwest Indiana, around Gary, who happens to be a Republican. In Virginia, there are three incumbent Democrats, all white women running for seats. They are being challenged by the Republicans with one white woman, one Hispanic woman, and one Vietnamese male. It’s a very diverse grouping, if you want to think of them as Republicans.

There’s the same kind of issues throughout – diversity issues – throughout the entire night. And the trends here will be closely watched.