Pity the young MAGA voter. They’re out at the bars. They’re on the apps. They might even have a genuine meet-cute. But it turns out that being an out-and-proud racist/sexist/homophobe isn’t as alluring a look on them as it is on the man they worship. And that just isn’t fair, is it? If it weren’t for politics, they’d surely have found their perfect match. Isn’t all this worrying about political compatibility spoiling pure, untainted love? Why can’t people just let go of their judgments and be open to meeting someone who very vocally looks down on them?
These are questions that media outlets began asking even before Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Columns with titles like “Would a Clinton voter date a Trump supporter? Actually, the outlook is great” and “Do millennials date outside their political party? These couples do” — both published in the Washington Post during Trump’s first term — tried to keep to a sunny, it’s-just-politics outlook with chipper sound bites from the likes of Stamford, Conn. mayor Caroline Simmons and Connecticut state senator Art Linares. Meanwhile, headlines like “How Donald Trump is killing romance” and “Swipe left if you voted for Trump” took what often seemed to be a bemused look at how some people were foregrounding their dating dealbreakers on apps like Tinder and Hinge. (“I still swipe right,” said one defensive Trump voter. “I would like them to know who I am first before I openly tell them I voted for this person. They know nothing about me. I’m a very reasonable guy. I’m a nice person, open-minded.”) More hardline publications like The Federalist argued that people being exasperatingly particular about so-called associative mating — wanting to share values, goals and interests with the person they might spend the rest of their lives with — was in itself evidence of a coming societal implosion.
As time went on and allying with Trumpism increasingly began requiring paranoia, bigotry, and a decision to live life in a factually unsupported parallel universe, it would have made sense if these outlets admitted that maybe a dearth of politically star-crossed love matches was probably for the best. Instead, Joe Biden’s presidency found stories like these not only proliferating but doubling down. The narrative was no longer about people across genders adding “No Trump supporters” to their dating profiles; rather, it was about an existential crisis: If liberal women remained unwilling to date Trump supporters, the very future of the human race was at risk. A Washington Post piece credited to “the Editorial Board” laid out the stakes in the grim headline “If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.”
There is an exquisite irony that the same men who have spent the last decade signal-boosting a circle jerk of masculinist propaganda are now being told that they are insufficiently high-value. But corporate media has committed too hard to this narrative for too long to just let it go that easily.
This would have been very big news in 1986, when warning women that their biological clocks were rapidly ticking down and the supply of single men dwindling was guaranteed to move units of magazines and newspapers. In the three years between 1983 and 1986 — when Newsweek published an infamous cover story suggesting that a college-educated heterosexual single woman hitting 40 was more likely to be killed in a terrorist attack than to find a husband — there were 53 feature articles similarly calibrated to stoke panic in the marriage-minded single gal. In 2023, however, WaPo’s attempt at a truth bomb failed to detonate, with the bulk of the piece’s 2,000-plus comments roasting the outlet’s cherry-picked data, shallow wording, and coy refusal to say exactly what political opinions liberal women should compromise in the name of marriage.
A 2021 piece in the National Review, meanwhile, argued that women who refused to date Trump supporters were committing “political discrimination” no different from “justify[ing] prejudice against Muslims or Jews.” “It’s clear that young people have become less tolerant of speech that violates progressive norms on race, gender, and sexuality,” huffed the piece’s author, without clarifying that the progressive norms in question — that LGBTQ people have a right to exist, for instance, or that women are more than incubators — weren’t specific to progressives, but had been mainstream for decades.
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The question that has gone conspicuously unposed in such arguments is, of course, why MAGA men care whether or not liberal women find them datable in the first place. It’s not like they’ve ever been shy about declaring that such women were miserable feminist harpies destined to die childless and alone with all their cats, after all. But the Washington Post’s most recent deep dive on what keeps Trump supporters so singularly dateless (“MAGA singles are looking for love in Washington. It’s a challenge”) might help answer that question. The piece, unlike most of its predecessors, focuses chiefly on the frustration of conservative women in D.C., whose optimism that a second Trump term would yield a bounty of eligible GOP bachelors is now bumping up against the reality that they aren’t bringing the A game of the high-value men they hope to be, and disappointing even the women most suited to them.
In the words of one 29-year-old hopeful future tradwife, the contenders she’d met during her time in D.C. were “[n]ot fit, workaholics and not taking finding a wife seriously.” Later in the piece, she complains: “I felt like, being in conservative politics, there would be more, like, masculine men . . . and I find that a lot of them aren’t as masculine as I would have hoped.” (One of the WaPo’s male interviewees, meanwhile, says he thought he’d found his Miss Right-Wing, but then a drag queen walked by and she dashed his hopes by being completely normal about it.) There is an exquisite irony that the same men who have spent the last decade signal-boosting a circle jerk of masculinist propaganda are now being told that they are insufficiently high-value. But corporate media has committed too hard to this narrative for too long to just let it go that easily.
One of the defining themes of romance narratives in any medium is that (spoiler alert) heterosexual women are at any given time ready to compromise their principles, desert their passions and become unrecognizable to themselves for the love of a man, but they can have some intellectual sparring and political-argument foreplay as a treat.
The fact that these stories remain evergreen speaks to an ambient cultural misogyny that still sees women as accessories to men, of course, but they also speak to a persistent belief, endemic to popular culture, that relationships are inherently oppositional. Is it really romance if the sparks don’t fly? Doesn’t difference beget the most exhilarating sexual chemistry? Does witty banter even count if you aren’t on opposing sides of a battle to seize the upper hand?
“I’ve been saying for years that the D.C. press has never gotten over James Carville and Mary Matalin,” says Sarah, 48, who lived in the city for almost three decades. “But, first of all, that happened when Democrats and Republicans disagreed more on tactics than on values. But also, their work wasn’t about political convictions. It was about winning elections.” By contrast, asking — after all the sexual assault and reflective misogyny, the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the promise to protect women “whether they like it or not” — why liberal women don’t want to date Trump supporters is akin to asking Why don’t you want to be with someone who hates everything you stand for?
One of the defining themes of romance narratives in any medium is that (spoiler alert) heterosexual women are at any given time ready to compromise their principles, desert their passions and become unrecognizable to themselves for the love of a man, but they can have some intellectual sparring and political-argument foreplay as a treat. And unfortunately, women continue to perpetuate the unhealthy idea that it’s a woman’s work to go spelunking in the psyches of conservative men, determined to find the kind, thoughtful decency that she must be overlooking or refusing to understand. A February 2025 dispatch in Cosmopolitan by a “Republican-curious” woman details what happened when she signed up for a conservative dating app and went on 26 dates with Trump supporters in an effort to understand them. The piece’s introduction invoked “contentious times” in which “extreme political ideologies have all but divided parts of the dating pool. Or have they?” and suggested that readers might be surprised by what she found on her 26 dates.
What she found was more or less exactly what you’d expect on a conservative dating app. There was the man who believed that it’s “undesirable for women to be too independent,” and should ideally be “trained” to submit to their husbands. There were the men who, when asked about their ideal woman, all invoked “an unvaccinated Christian white woman willing to quit her job and commit to homeschooling children.” There was the guy she recognized as someone who had once sent her death threats, who asserted on their first date that “White, liberal women are a plague on our society” and then “proceeded to drink 11 iced coffees.” She undertook this experiment, she wrote, to push back against “the idea that a person’s identity can be reduced to a one-dimensional entity based solely on who they voted for.” “As someone who cares about bringing people together, I wondered whether it was me who had been excluding them.”That is, of course, the goal of every attempt to portray Trump voters as romantic martyrs. The premise of all the digital ink devoted to finding the hidden depths in men who support Trump is that they must in some way be profoundly misunderstood, that their embrace of bigotry and megalomania is not nearly as much of a problem as people who find it repellent. Mentions of polarization and extreme ideology imply that liberal, anti-MAGA voters are being similarly shunned on the apps and the Washington Post just doesn’t want to cover it. Lamenting the loneliness of people who take pride in alienating others requires recasting antisocial behavior as political bravery. And referring to unspecific “differences of opinion” as trivial demands framing “Pineapple on pizza is an abomination” and “Another Holocaust would be awesome” as equally consequential statements.
Yes, opposites can attract, but wanting a relationship that’s relaxed and companionable isn’t a weakness. “I know couples whose relationships didn’t survive because one of them went full MAGA,” Sarah muses. “And when people were like, ‘Oh, what a shame they couldn’t make it work,’ I always thought, Why? Nobody would say that to someone whose spouse got involved with a doomsday cult. They wouldn’t be like, ‘Well, that’s on you for not believing what the cult leader says.’ They’d say, “I’m so sorry your person chose to leave your shared reality.”
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love in the time of Trump
