Swiping right ahead of the election: Popular dating apps have new features to show off political views

By Kaanita Iyer, CNN

(CNN) — Recognizing that daters are increasingly prioritizing politics in their search for “the one,” many dating apps have introduced features that make it easier for users to match with potential partners based on their politics in the run-up to the election.

Tinder last month launched its “Take Action Center,” which introduced profile stickers that allow users to share whether they will be voting and the issues important to them. The most popular stickers among the new ones rolled out are “Hot people vote (I’m voting)” and “Voting for reproductive rights.”

Abortion rights are on the ballot in 10 states next month as the issue continues to be a major political flashpoint.

“We are really committed to protecting reproductive freedom because we believe this really impacts dating and relationships,” said Stephanie Danzi, senior vice president of global marketing for Tinder.

“It’s really about making sure (the app’s users) understand what is kind of at stake,” she added.

The “Take Action Center” also features a partnership with Vote.org, a nonpartisan voter registration organization, to provide users with election-related information such as polling locations and voter registration deadlines.

Meanwhile, OkCupid has added a dozen new matching questions that focus on voter behavior and help show users more compatible profiles. The questions, added in January, include “Are you voting in the 2024 presidential election?”; “What’s the most important issue to you in the 2024 presidential election?” and “Is it a deal breaker if your date is voting for a different candidate than you in the 2024 presidential election?”

These questions mark a shift in the app’s strategy which previously featured policy-and candidate-specific questions, such as, “Is climate change real?” And following the 2016 election, one of OkCupid’s matching questions was simply, “Trump?” Users could choose “hell yes,” “yes,” “no,” or “hell no,” and nearly 75% of respondents chose the last option.

Michael Kaye, the director of brand marketing and communications for OkCupid, said the new direction stems from a change in the way users talk about politics — from conversations centered around Joe Biden versus Donald Trump ahead of 2020 to broader discussions “focused on what’s happening in the world” ahead of this November.

“We really wanted to be mindful and careful with the questions that we were adding to the app and not adding any questions that felt like we were splintering people apart further than they already have,” Kaye told CNN.

While registered US voters are split near evenly between the two parties, according to Pew Research Center, daters on OkCupid tend to lean more liberal. But 44% of users who chose to answer a matching question on their political beliefs chose “other” among the options of “politically liberal,” “politically moderate” and “politically conservative,” according to OkCupid’s data.

The app itself has taken progressive stances on political issues and currently has an “I’m Pro-Choice” badge, which was first introduced in 2021 (OkCupid donated to Planned Parenthood as part of the launch).

“Our thought process with our matching questions … is if we’re talking about it with our friends, if we’re talking about it with our family or coworkers, most likely people are talking about it on their dates,” Kaye said.

Deal breakers

For Ashley Houghton, 29, dating someone who does not have the same political beliefs is “100% a deal breaker,” and when she was talking to potential partners on dating apps, she brought up politics “right off the bat.”

“My opening line is, ‘What do you think about these issues?’” said Houghton, who lives in California and works in communications, who said a match’s responses tells her whether she wants to continue the conversation.

These features build on what young daters were already doing to weed out potential partners, such as including “#BLM” in their dating app profiles in 2020 to indicate their support for the Black Lives Matter movement, noted Lisa Wade, an associate professor of sociology at Tulane University whose research focuses on undergraduate social and sexual life.

Wade added that young daters became more inclined to prioritize shared political values during the pandemic, when vaccines and health mandates became politicized and there were widespread protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

“For those students who wanted to be cautious about Covid, for the first time ever, they started asking their potential sexual partners — who they’re mostly meeting on apps — about their level of covid cautiousness … (which) had been aligned with politics,” Wade said. “They did decide that, even when we’re just talking about a hookup … that it mattered to them. Politics mattered to them in a way that it had not before.”

Political polarization in dating represents a microcosm of a larger issue: of people choosing to “isolate ourselves from disagreeable points of views” and being increasingly able to do so, cautioned Casey Klofstad, a professor of political science at University of Miami.

“We are able to tailor our daily lives — whether it’s media consumption, whether it’s the leisure activities that we engage in and … the people that we associate with socially or romantically,” Klofstad said. “The more that we do that, I fear, that deepens the divide that already exists between us.”

CNN reached out to Hinge, Grindr and the right-leaning dating site Christian Mingle but did not receive a response.

In a statement, Bumble shared the results of its own recent survey, which found that 48% of respondents think “it is important for them to talk about key social issues while getting to know someone romantically, including voting or social causes they care about, to gauge compatibility and shared values.”

The other side of the dating app aisle

The Right Stuff, an app created in 2022 for conservative daters, is also hoping to create an environment catering to shared values.

The app, co-founded by John McEntee, a Project 2025 strategist and former Donald Trump aide, features political prompts such as “Favorite liberal lie,” and “January 6 was,” which allows users to fill in the blank. But an executive for the app stressed that the app isn’t “overtly political in nature.”

Raquel Debono, the app’s director of marketing and communications, argues that on The Right Stuff, “politics is almost out of the way.”

“Our essential purpose on the app is to connect conservatives and because they’re politically aligned … the biggest filter is sort of done for you,” Debono said.

The app hasn’t rolled out features specific to the election, though Debono said that the team is considering sending a blast message asking users whether they have registered to vote. It is also using current political events to court young conservatives on social media, particularly TikTok, where it has 3.3 million followers — more than three times as many as Tinder and OkCupid combined. The Right Stuff currently has 70,000 active users, according to the app.

Debono recognizes that political concerns are important to daters, especially ahead of a presidential election.

“Political alignment is increasingly becoming a nonnegotiable factor for many people who are dating,” Debono said. “I think that an election year just sort of highlights that as Americans have sort of made political alignment more central to their identities in general and … just increases the awareness and visibility of sort of the divide in our country.”

“And not that that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” she added, “but it’s the reality we live in.”

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