Politico News Scraper

Politico News Scraper

Scrape Politico articles from any section or RSS feed, up to a million per run. Every article comes with its headline, author, publication date, and full body text. No login or API key. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

Politico's coverage spans Congress, the White House, defense, health care, and a dozen other policy verticals, but reading across all of them by hand is slow. This Actor reads the official Politico RSS feeds directly, so you collect articles from the sections you care about, or from any custom Politico feed URL, in one fixed schema.\n\nNo browser, no credentials, and no manual clicking. Pick your sections, set a limit, and get structured rows back.

Who uses it	What they scrape Politico for
Policy analysts	Monitor legislative and regulatory developments across multiple policy areas in one feed.
Communications professionals	Track how a specific issue or elected official is being covered by the DC press corps.
Data journalists	Build a corpus of Politico articles for a long-term investigation or quantitative analysis.
Academic researchers	Collect a structured dataset of political news coverage for a study on media framing.

What it does

This Actor collects Politico articles from the official section RSS feeds or from custom Politico RSS URLs, and returns each article as a flat row.

• 📡 Pre-built sections: Choose from 14 Politico sections, including Congress, White House, Defense, Health Care, and Playbook.
• 🔗 Custom RSS feeds: Paste any valid Politico RSS feed URL to scrape a topic or author feed not in the section list.
• 📏 Flexible limits: Collect as few as one article for a quick check, or up to a million for a full archive.

Results export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML, or straight from the API.

What you can do with Politico data

📋 Monitor a policy beat.

A policy analyst runs the Actor daily on the Congress and Health Care sections to catch every hearing mention and bill markup before the morning meeting.

📰 Build a press clipping pipeline.

A communications director feeds the White House and Politics sections into a spreadsheet so the team sees every mention of their principal within an hour of publication.

🗂️ Archive coverage for research.

An academic researcher collects a year of Defense and Energy articles to study how national security language shifted across two administrations.

📊 Power a news dashboard.

A developer pulls the Technology and Trade feeds into a live dashboard that tracks policy news alongside market data for a trading desk.

Why choose this scraper

	What you get
No API key needed	Reads the same public RSS feeds your browser does, with no registration or token management.
Structured output	Every article lands in your dataset with a consistent schema, ready for analysis or a database.
Multi-section in one run	Combine Congress, White House, and Technology in a single run instead of checking each feed separately.

How it compares

No other Store actor targets Politico the same way, so the honest comparison is with the alternatives teams actually weigh.

	Politico News Scraper	Build it in-house	By hand
Setup	Run it now, zero config	Days of engineering	None, but hours per pull
When Politico changes	Maintained for you	You fix it	You re-learn the page
Proxies, retries, anti-bot	Built in	Your problem	Browser only
Output	Fixed JSON schema, CSV/Excel export	Whatever you build	Copy-paste
Cost	Pay per result	Engineering time	Analyst hours

Configure the run

Drive the Actor from the built-in section list, custom Politico RSS feed URLs, or both together, and set a maximum article count that applies across all feeds. The Input tab lists every parameter.

A first run with the defaults:

{
 "maxItems": 10
}

A larger pull:

{
 "maxItems": 200
}

Pricing

Pay-per-result: $0.0075 per result collected. You pay only for the results written to your dataset.

Results collected	Approximate cost
100 results	$0.75
1,000 results	$7.50
10,000 results	$75.00

New Apify accounts start with $5 in free credit.

Free users

Free-plan runs return up to 10 results as a preview. Upgrade your Apify plan to collect up to 1,000,000 results per run.

Run it

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 in credit.
2. Open the Politico News Scraper.
3. Set your inputs and any filters, then click Start.
4. Export the results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Dataset tab.

Run it programmatically through the Apify API (run-sync-get-dataset-items) or the ApifyClient for JavaScript and Python.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Give an AI agent live access to Politico through the Model Context Protocol. Add the Actor to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client:

claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=parseforge/politico-news-scraper"

Then prompt it in plain language to run the scraper and read back the results.

Troubleshooting

Why am I getting no results?

Check that you have selected at least one section or entered at least one valid Politico RSS feed URL. Also verify that your maximum articles count is set to 1 or higher. If the feeds have no new articles since your last run, the output will be empty.

Why are some articles missing the author or body text?

Some Politico articles, particularly briefs or live updates, may not have a byline or may have a different page structure. The Actor extracts what is available and leaves fields empty when the data is not present on the page.

The run timed out. What should I do?

Lower your maximum articles count or reduce the number of feeds you are scraping in one run. You can split a large backfill across multiple runs by date range or section.

I pasted a feed URL but it is not being scraped.

Make sure the URL is a valid Politico RSS feed that starts with https://rss.politico.com/. The Actor only processes URLs from the Politico RSS domain.

Can I get articles older than what the RSS feed shows?

RSS feeds typically show only the most recent articles, usually the last 20 to 50. The Actor collects whatever the feed returns at the time of the run. For older articles, you would need to run the Actor repeatedly over time to build an archive.

FAQ

Question	Answer
Does this Actor scrape the full article text?	Yes. It follows the link from each RSS item and extracts the full body text of the article, along with the headline, author, and publication date.
Can I scrape a Politico section that is not in the dropdown?	Yes. Use the custom RSS feed URLs field to paste any valid Politico RSS feed, such as a topic page or an author feed, and the Actor will collect articles from it.
How many articles can I collect in one run?	You set the limit. The maximum is one million articles per run, which is enough to backfill years of coverage across multiple sections.
Do I need a Politico subscription or login?	No. The Actor reads the publicly available RSS feeds, which do not require a subscription or authentication.
How often are the RSS feeds updated?	Politico updates its RSS feeds continuously throughout the day. Running the Actor on a schedule gives you near-real-time collection of new articles.
What output formats are supported?	You can export your dataset as CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML from the Apify platform, or push it directly to an external service via an integration.
Can I filter articles by keyword or date?	The Actor collects all articles from the feeds you select, up to your maximum count. You can filter the resulting dataset by any field after the run completes, using Apify's dataset tools or your own scripts.
Does this Actor handle Politico's paywalled content?	The Actor reads what is available in the public RSS feed and on the public article page. It does not bypass paywalls or access subscriber-only content.
Can I run this on a schedule?	Yes. Apify supports scheduled runs, so you can set the Actor to collect new Politico articles every hour, every morning, or on any cron schedule you need.
What is the difference between the sections and the custom feed URLs?	The sections dropdown is a convenience list of the most popular Politico RSS feeds. The custom feed URLs field lets you add any other Politico RSS feed on top of, or instead of, the built-in list.

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Browse the full ParseForge collection for more scrapers.

🆘 Need help? Email parseforge@protonmail.com with your run ID, your input, and what you expected.

⚠️ Disclaimer. This Actor is unofficial and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by POLITICO LLC. It collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using the collected data in compliance with the source's terms of service and applicable data-protection laws, including GDPR, CCPA, and PIPL. Do not use it to collect personal data unlawfully.