Weekly Candidate Update — April 12, 2026

Hi everyone,

This week's candidate scrape is done. All three race types have been updated from Ballotpedia as of today. Here's what changed since last week:

This Week's Numbers

U.S. House (25 states) +304 / −21

U.S. Senate (13 states) +45 / −21

Governors (32 states) +116 / −97

Total across 41 states +465 / −139

Notable Changes

Texas House saw the biggest jump — dozens of new candidates filed across all 38 districts, especially in open seats created by members running for Senate or Governor.
Illinois Senate added 14 new candidates as that open-seat race heats up.
North Carolina Senate gained 10 new filers, including Roy Cooper (D) and Michael Whatley (R).
Hawaii Governor had 20 new candidates appear — the Ballotpedia page was just created this week.
Tennessee cleaned up across both Senate and Governor races, dropping candidates who withdrew or didn't qualify.

New Scraping Pipeline

I've built a much better system for keeping this data current. Instead of manually checking each race, we now have an automated pipeline that saves every Ballotpedia page using a real browser, strips the HTML down to just candidate data, and uses AI agents to parse all candidates by party. The whole process — all 435 House districts, 33 Senate races, and 39 Governor races — takes about 20 minutes.

The full changes report is live at quarex.org/reports/election/2026-candidate-changes.html.

I'll be on a road trip April 15–21, so the next update will be the week I get back. After that, this becomes a weekly cadence.

— Peter