Weekly Candidate Update

Hi everyone,

This week's candidate scrape is complete and live on quarex.org. We are not issuing a changes list this week — here's why.

Scraper Upgrade

Ballotpedia changed their bot protection a couple of weeks ago, which broke our existing Python scrapers and meant several recent scrapes were partial. We rebuilt the pipeline this week using Selenium, which gets us reliably past the new protection and reads the full page state for every state, district, and territory.

Why we're skipping the diff this week

The new scraper picked up hundreds of candidates the older scrapes had been missing — not new filings, but pre-existing candidates that the older scrapers couldn't see. A diff against last week would conflate genuine new activity with weeks of catch-up, which would mislead more than it informs.

What the New Scraper Caught

A few examples of races where the data was incomplete and is now whole:

Minnesota Governor: The full field is now visible, including U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D), who entered the race on January 29 after Governor Walz suspended his reelection campaign. The Republican field includes House Speaker Lisa Demuth, former state Senator Scott Jensen, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and Army veteran Kendall Qualls.
Alaska Governor: 15 candidates added across all parties, including Adam Crum (R), Click Bishop (R), Nancy Dahlstrom (R), Treg Taylor (R), and Tom Begich (D).
Maryland Governor: Incumbent Wes Moore (D) is now properly listed, alongside a 10-candidate Republican primary field.
Texas U.S. House: The full 38-district field is now reflected, including Jasmine Crockett moving from the Senate race to TX-18 (where Al Green is also running).
Utah, Illinois, North Carolina: Cleanup of convention/primary losers that should have been pruned weeks ago.

Coverage Going Forward

From this point on, weekly diffs will be apples-to-apples. The full federal coverage now sits at 441 House districts, 33 Senate races, and 39 Governor races across all 50 states, DC, and the five inhabited territories.

The complete candidate database is live at quarex.org/libraries under Politician Research, and is also fully searchable through Quarex Compose.

Next week's update will be a normal week-over-week diff with the cleaner baseline.

— Peter