CEO Update: 4.5 million Texans just voted. Primary season is here.

Last Tuesday, nearly 4.5 million Texans voted in the March 3 primaries. That’s about 24% of registered voters, up from 17% and 18% in the 2018 and 2022 midterm primaries. It was the highest midterm primary turnout in the state’s recent history.

The Texas Senate race became the most expensive Senate primary ever. Ad spending on the Republican side alone approached $100 million. Combined with the Democratic primary, the total hit $128 million. For a primary. Senator John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton are headed to a May 26 runoff. On the Democratic side, state Rep. James Talarico won the nomination.

But the number that caught my attention wasn’t the spending. It was this: Democratic primary turnout more than doubled compared to recent cycles. In 2022, about 1.07 million Democrats voted in the primary. This year, 2.3 million did. Nearly two-thirds of Texas counties saw higher participation than four years ago, across both parties.

People are showing up. Across the political spectrum. In a primary.

I keep saying this, and I’ll keep saying it until the data changes: the problem in American elections is not that people don’t care. It’s that they don’t have the information they need. They don’t know the date. They don’t know they’re eligible. They don’t know where to go. The most common reasons voters give for missing an election are logistical, not ideological.

That’s especially true for primaries. Primaries decide who’s on the ballot in November. In many districts, they’re the only election that matters. But even after this week’s surge, 76% of registered Texas voters stayed home. Not because they don’t care about who represents them. Because the primary calendar is a mess, and nobody tells them when it’s happening.

So we built something.

Later this month, we’re launching a new tool called Calendar. Enter your address. See every upcoming election you’re eligible to vote in: primaries, runoffs, special elections, and local races. Registration deadlines, early voting dates, and Election Day. One tap adds it to your phone.

We built this because the single biggest informational barrier to voting is not knowing when elections happen. Nobody publishes a complete election calendar in one place. Now we do.

Calendar joins our suite of free voter engagement tools, and like all of our tools, it will be embeddable on any website. Every voter who uses it gets automatically opted into election reminders for every future election.