Ralph Loop 2026-03-16: Elections Politics-Sleeve Alias

Why this change

Recent live candidate review was dominated by Elections rows that already used politics-style priors but still fell into no_semantic_sleeve_match because the bounded politics sleeves only matched the literal Politics category label.

Change

• Treated Elections as a valid category match for politics-family sleeves in research/strategy.py.
• Mirrored the same category matching in research/candidate_review.py so live sleeve attribution stays aligned with replay/search strategy behavior.
• Kept the hard deployment gate unchanged. This only improves sleeve matching and candidate-review state quality.

Result

A low-price Elections row that previously surfaced as an unmatched research_candidate now lands in review_candidate under politics_midprice_reversal with one explicit local blocker: live_price<0.1.

Validation

• pytest -q tests/test_candidate_review.py tests/test_research_search.py tests/test_continuous_loop.py tests/test_research_status.py
• 42 passed in 0.13s
• Manual smoke classification of an Elections row:
• sleeve_family=politics_midprice_reversal
• state=review_candidate
• invalidation_reasons=["live_price<0.1"]
• semantic_invalidation_reasons=[]