Posted on October 16, 2025
With the 2025 local government elections almost out of the way I'm pleased to let you know about some big updates to The Progress Report.
I've merged my central and local government candidate databases - so I now have a combined database with 4,700 NZ politicians. This includes everyone who stood in the 2025 local government election, as well as all candidates for the 2023, 2020 and 2017 general elections. I'm intending to gradually backfill with more historical data.
This means you can easily look at a record and see what other elections they've contested, and which other banners they've stood under. I've already found some really interesting examples.
To make it easier to find and use this data I've upgraded the search facilities on my Politician Database page - so you can now search by party/affiliation, election, body, office and even the outcome of the elections they stood in. Want to find everyone who was just elected unopposed to the Auckland Council? Easy!
And one last quality of life improvement, I've updated the search function so it works well with special characters. Now if you search for "Nandor" you'll find "Nándor Tanczos".
As always, feedback is more than welcome. Please get in touch if you've any suggestions, ideas or new data sources.