Politician ID Updates

Summary of Changes

Prior to 11/18/2023, the following politician ID values were available for candidates and incumbents in the Elections response:

• National Politician ID or NPID (polID in JSON; @PolID in XML). Unique National Politician ID across all states and races (only for politicians who have run in a national race). For local politicians, this value was set to "0".

• Politician Number (polNum in JSON; @PolNum in XML). AP-assigned unique ID for this candidate in a specific state, regardless of race candidacy.

• Candidate ID (candidateID in JSON; Incumbents/Candidate/@CandidateID and Candidate/@ID in XML). AP-assigned unique ID for this candidate in a state's race. If a candidate was running in multiple races, this candidate had a different Candidate ID in each race.

Starting from 11/18/2023, the following updates for candidates and incumbents are available in the Elections response:

• Politician ID (polID in JSON; @PolID in XML). The Unique National Politician ID across all states and races is now available for ALL politicians.

• Politician Number (polNum in JSON; @PolNum in XML) and Candidate ID (candidateID in JSON; Incumbents/Candidate/@CandidateID and Candidate/@ID in XML) have the same value as the National Politician ID (NPID).

XML Examples

 

Note
For brevity, these examples are provided in XML. JSON property names match the names of the XML attributes and are available for reference above.

Before

After