Marjorie Clifton Is Helping Texans Reclaim the Elections That Matter Most

Marjorie Clifton has spent enough years around politics to know how easily voters can lose influence in elections—not because they don’t care, but because the system can be confusing and misleading in where real decisions get made.

“There are so many people who would participate in primary elections if they just understood what was happening,” she says. “But the reality is, most people don’t even know a primary election is happening.”

In Texas, this disconnect has major consequences. Primaries often determine who makes it onto the ballot—and, in many races, who ultimately holds office.

“In Texas, 97% of all the elected seats in our state are elected by 3% of voters in primaries,” Clifton says. “If you really unpack that, that’s insane.”

This is why Clifton—after a long career in political communications and media—now spends her time as a consultant and organizer with March Matters, a statewide coalition focused on boosting primary election participation. The work isn’t about party or ideology; it’s about education.

The election before the election

Texas is a massive state with massive stakes—yet primary turnout remains stubbornly low.

“Only 14% of eligible people vote in the primary election,” Clifton says. “And over 70% of that population is over the age of 50.”

That means a relatively small, habitual voting bloc is shaping candidate selection and essentially choosing representatives for everyone else. With this outsized influence, candidates are pushed to cater to that slice of the electorate—not the broader public.

“It’s very, very rare,” Clifton says, “for most districts to really be decided in November. The primary is where it happens.”

That dynamic doesn’t just rob November votes of their power—it creates bad incentives for candidates. Political parties and interest groups know exactly who shows up in primaries, which means the overwhelming share of messaging and spending gets aimed at the same narrow group, year after year.

“All their firepower, all their money, all their spending is being spent on just that voting group,” Clifton says. “And around 59% of the population never hears anything about the fact that there’s even a primary election happening.”

The result is a kind of democratic distortion: a system technically open to all, but functionally run by the few.

“And that works,” she adds, “for the extremes. They’re incentivized to focus on the same narrow group of primary voters and ignore everyone else.”

A bridge between the system and the people

Clifton doesn’t say this as someone throwing stones from the outside. She says it as someone who spent years inside the ecosystem—and knows how alien it can feel to people who aren’t political professionals.

“I lived in Washington, D.C. for 10 years,” she says. “And I thought everybody spoke in acronyms and understood all these complex things about voting.”

They don’t. And Clifton realized that even well-meaning civic engagement efforts can accidentally widen the gap—using insider language, assuming baseline knowledge, or framing participation as something only “political” people do.

March Matters was designed to do the opposite: make participation feel normal, clear, and hard to miss—by ensuring that voters hear about primaries through their workplaces, congregations, and community networks.

March Matters gives partner organizations a simple prompt: March matters to what? In other words, what’s at stake in your community—healthcare access, the right to vote, grocery prices, or something else that feels immediate and real. “The idea is that I go out into my community,” Clifton says. “When I go to the grocery store, I hear that March matters, and when I go to my church, I hear that March matters, and I hear that from community groups I'm involved with.” Over time, that repetition helps make primary voting feel normal again, not like something only political insiders do.

“People don’t need another nonprofit or another government agency telling them what to do,” Clifton says. “They need to hear it from places they already trust.”

Making participation easier—and less intimidating

March Matters doesn’t tell Texans what to believe. It gives them tools to participate.

“We are not endorsing policy. We are not endorsing anyone,” Clifton says. “We are strictly an education and turnout campaign.”

Partners receive a ready-to-use toolkit—yard signs, posters, emails, social media templates—designed to be customized and deployed quickly.

“We focus on talking to people like normal people do talk,” Clifton says, “not the way politicians talk.”

That decision is more consequential than it sounds. Clifton knows how intimidating the system can feel if you’re unfamiliar with it—and how powerful it is when participation becomes a habit.

“Voting is kind of like going to the dentist,” she says. “It’s hard to get people in the door the first time. But once you’ve done it, you’re like, ‘Okay, that wasn’t as terrible as I thought.’ And by the way, I feel better when I do it.”

The deeper bet behind March Matters is cultural: If more people participate in primaries, the entire system begins to respond differently. Candidates campaign to a broader electorate. Incentives shift. Leaders become responsive to a wider public.

And November starts to look less predetermined—and more representative.

Why it gives her hope

Clifton has watched polarization escalate over decades—enough to see how politics can seep into families, friendships, and communities.

“I was a media commentator for 15 years,” she says, “and I was in the middle of that, getting death threats, people getting super angry, and watching people’s families being torn apart by this feeling of partisan divide.”

For her, the way forward isn’t more outrage or higher-volume messaging. It’s rebuilding a foundation: giving people basic, trustworthy information and making participation feel accessible again.

March Matters is testing a model that could expand beyond Texas. But for Clifton, success starts with something smaller—and more powerful: when people start feeling invited in.

Because leadership in Texas is often decided long before November. And democracy works better when more people are part of that decision.

‍