Dating in 2025: would you swipe left on someone who votes different?

I’ve edited and reported plenty of pieces on modern dating, but this one hits a nerve: politics is no longer just a debate topic—it’s a filter. And not a subtle one.

A new burst of research and reporting suggests more daters—especially women—are screening potential partners by their politics before a first hello.

As a former analyst who loves a clean data table as much as a good love story, I wanted to know what’s signal and what’s noise. Here’s what I found, and what it means if you’re dating in 2025.

What the new report actually says

Over the weekend, the New York Post highlighted findings from a global survey of 13,000+ single women across 144 countries, conducted by researchers at the University of Göttingen and the University of Jena (working with the Clue health app).

The topline: women at the ideological extremes are the most likely to make politics a hard dealbreaker.

According to the reporting, 47% of women who identified on the far left and 41% on the far right said they’d prefer to stay single rather than date someone with the “wrong” politics; among moderates, just 22% said the same.

It’s worth pausing on what that does—and doesn’t—mean. This isn’t a claim that most women won’t date across the aisle. It’s a signal that the strongest gatekeeping is clustered at the ends of the spectrum.

The same coverage notes that conservative women in the sample prioritized traditional traits (religion, shared ethnicity, financial security), while kindness and supportiveness still mattered across the board. If you’re dating right now, you’ve probably felt that tug-of-war: values first, but also “are you decent to the waiter?”

How dating apps baked politics into the swipe

One reason politics feels more ever-present in dating: it’s visible.

Several major apps now let you display or even filter by political alignment. As the Survey Center on American Life’s Daniel Cox has argued, “In the era of online dating, social media, snap judgments, and swiping based on little information, political identity has become more salient in dating considerations.”

He points to another reality: women, especially liberal women, are more likely than others to distance themselves from people with opposing political views. That doesn’t make women “closed-minded”; it reflects how certain policy positions map onto safety, autonomy, and dignity.

If an issue feels existential, you won’t treat it like a quirky difference in music taste.

Voting has become a proxy for values

This isn’t entirely new. Back in 2020, Pew Research Center found that Democrats looking for a relationship were far less open to dating someone who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

The asymmetry was striking: a much larger share of Democrats said they “definitely would not” date a Trump voter than Republicans who said they “definitely would not” date a Hillary Clinton voter. In other words, the partisan gap in dating preferences predates the current cycle.

What’s evolved is how explicitly we treat voting as a moral shorthand. When I ask friends what their “no-go” looks like, they don’t say “Republican” or “Democrat” in the abstract. They say: reproductive rights, immigration, LGBTQ+ protections, science literacy. They’re not filtering for a tribe so much as a worldview.

Political scientists have a term for this: sorting. We’ve been assorting into communities, media diets, and now relationships that mirror our core values. As Penn State professor Pete Hatemi put it in the Post story, “Couples assort on politics more than any other trait in the last 20 years.”

It’s a provocative claim—one that captures both the gravity and the costs of our current moment.

The gender split underneath the headline

There’s also a fresh gender story running beneath the surface.

Cox’s recent commentary notes that by the 2024 election, single men and single women split sharply in presidential preferences—and that many single women reported being less likely to date a Trump supporter.

That gendered divergence shows up in the dating pool as early refusals to engage, or as first-date walkaways when a conversation turns to abortion access or transgender rights.

You can experience that as narrowing options—or as time saved. I’ve heard versions of both. One friend told me she feels “safer,” because she knows sooner whether a date’s worldview supports hers.

Another worries she’s eliminating perfectly kind people who might disagree on two issues but show up beautifully on everything else.

What the data can’t (yet) tell us

As an analyst, I have to add the asterisks. The global study highlighted in the Post pulls from an “Ideal Partner Survey,” with responses that skew toward wealthier, Western countries and include data fielded several years back.

That matters.

Datasets like this are invaluable for pattern spotting, but they’re not a mirror held up to every city bar or Bumble stack tonight. Methodology—how people were recruited, which demographic segments are overrepresented, and how “political difference” was defined—shapes what we can infer.

The U.S.-specific trendlines are clearer. Pew’s earlier work captured the growing reluctance—especially among Democrats—to date across the 2016 line. And the Survey Center has repeatedly found that women are more likely to treat politics as a social boundary in friendships and dating.

\Put together, the arc is hard to ignore: more daters are treating politics as a proxy for character, and women are leading that shift.

The human side: filters, green flags, and second chances

Let me zoom out of the charts for a second. I’ve been on exactly one first date where politics never came up, and the silence was… loud.

These days, values are less “taboo topics” and more “table stakes.” But here’s the tension I keep hearing from readers: how do you weigh political alignment against everything else that makes a relationship tick?

I use a simple thought experiment. Which of your nonnegotiables would meaningfully change your day-to-day safety and well-being if someone disagreed?

If your date’s stance affects your bodily autonomy, your legal rights, or your ability to move through your community without fear—that’s not a mere preference conflict. That’s fundamental.

On the other hand, if your differences sit in the realm of policy approaches rather than basic rights—say, you land on different tax thresholds or disagree about the exact contours of immigration reform—there’s room to test for curiosity, empathy, and intellectual humility.

Politics can be a values proxy, but it’s not the only one.

Are we losing the plot on compatibility?

The fear behind all this is that we’re shrinking our dating pools to ideological clones. The hope is that we’re being kinder to our future selves by filtering for aligned values earlier. Both can be true.

From a well-being perspective, there’s a sweet spot: clarity without rigidity. It’s healthy to be transparent on your profile about what matters to you—especially if those values are integral to how you want to build a life.

It’s also healthy to ask yourself, “Am I using politics as a shield to avoid other risks—vulnerability, commitment, conflict?” Sometimes the firm “no” is about genuine values.

Sometimes it’s about self-protection in a chaotic world.

If you’re dating in 2025, here’s how I’d navigate it

• Lead with what you’re for. If you support reproductive freedom, racial equity, or LGBTQ+ rights, say that plainly. Specifics are better than labels.

• Ask values questions, not quiz questions. “How do you think couples should make big decisions?” reveals more than “Who did you vote for?”

• Watch for curiosity. You don’t need a debate partner. You do need someone who can ask “Tell me more” without defensiveness.

• Use app filters thoughtfully. They can save time, but they can also make you miss the person whose politics diverge in one area but align deeply where it counts for you.

• Notice how political talk feels in your body. Do you feel safe? Dismissed? Seen? Your nervous system is data, too.

None of that is about being fuzzy on your principles. It’s about matching the type of alignment you need with the type of relationship you want.

Where this lands me on the swipe question

So, would I swipe left on someone who votes different? Sometimes—absolutely. If their vote reflects a vision of the world that makes me less safe or less free, I’m not auditioning for “opposites attract.”

If their politics differ in ways that don’t threaten core rights or dignity, I want to see how they talk about people unlike them, how they treat service staff, whether they’re willing to let new evidence change their mind. I’m open to the possibility that a good partner can disagree on some policies and still align on the life we’re trying to build.

As noted in the new reporting and in recent surveys, the trendline is clear: politics has become a bright-line test for more daters, particularly women. The more interesting question—and the one only you can answer—is what your bright line protects.

If it’s your safety and values, honor it. If it’s your comfort zone, consider loosening the grip.

Either way, clarity is kind. To you and to the person on the other side of the screen.