Hi everyone,
This week's candidate refresh is live on quarex.org. Notable activity is concentrated in late-primary states where filing windows are still active — and a wave of post-deadline cleanup in states whose filing has closed.
This week's movement: 19 states with changes —
House +49 / −27 (15 states),
Senate +0 / −19 (4 states),
Governor +1 / −10 (5 states).
The full week-over-week diff is live at quarex.org/reports/election/2026-candidate-changes.html.
Notable House moves
- Washington (+19): Heavy filing activity across the state's top-two jungle primary. WA-05 alone added 4 candidates (Andrew Bartleson, Kyle Ursey, Michael McGarr, Richard Freudenberg), with adds in WA-01, 02, 03, 04, 06, 07, 09, and 10 as well.
- Utah (+17): The state's convention path delivered a flood of candidates as Republican and Democratic conventions formalized their slates. UT-01 added 5, UT-04 added 6 (mostly Republicans challenging in the open seat after Burgess Owens stepped aside).
- Florida (+2 / −4): Light churn — four candidates dropped off the ballot, two new entries.
- South Carolina (−5): Post-deadline cleanup of candidates who didn't qualify.
Notable Senate moves
- West Virginia (−9): Largest Senate cleanup of the week — nine candidates removed who had withdrawn or failed to qualify.
- Nebraska (−6): Similar post-deadline trimming as the field consolidates.
- Louisiana (−2): Bill Cassidy and Mark Spencer removed.
- No new Senate filings this week — the Senate field is largely set going into the summer.
Notable Governor moves
- Nebraska (−7): Largest governor cleanup — candidates who didn't make the ballot.
- Iowa (+1): One new candidate added.
- Quiet overall — most governor fields are now stable.
Coverage
Federal totals stand at 441 House districts, 33 Senate races, and 39 Governor races across all 50 states, DC, and the five inhabited territories — same as last week. The full database is searchable at quarex.org/libraries under Politician Research, and through Quarex Compose.
Under the hood: We hardened the scrape pipeline this week. The Ballotpedia downloader now uses Chrome (msedgedriver had been throwing intermittent failures after Edge auto-updates), each state runs in its own subprocess with a 120-second timeout so one hung page can't crash a whole run, and downloads are now validated for completeness before AI parsing begins. The full 56-jurisdiction pull, which had been our flakiest weekly step, is now reliable end-to-end.
— Peter