'I was walking out on dates': A dating show cut MAGA men rejections

The reality TV show “Love is Blind” shows men and women getting to know each other and trying to fall in love without meeting in person — which apparently means, two women on the show revealed, that they screened out any man who supported President Donald Trump. Yet those decisions were edited out of the episodes which ultimately aired.

Jessica Barrett discussed this on the March 2nd episode of a podcast dedicated to the show, explaining "you don't get to see any of" her conversations about politics. "I specifically asked everyone, 'Did you vote for Trump? Are you a Trump supporter?' And I talked ad nauseam about human rights because that is such a pillar of my life," Barret, a doctor who specializes in infectious diseases, added. "I talked a huge amount about human rights in all capacities — abortion, everything."

Even though this was "very uncomfortable for some people,” Barrett described that as “fine," saying the question was "a great filter. ... Do you care about other people, or do you not?"

Barrett was not alone among “Love is Blind” contestants who screened out Trump supporters.

"Not everything makes the cut, but something I stood really firmly on was my political beliefs. And I had a ton of conversations about that in the pods with men who had opposing beliefs," marketing director Keya Kellum said on a Feb. 18 episode of the show’s podcast “What’s The Reality?” Kellum says her "dates dwindled" when she told potential love interests she would never date a Trump supporter, but none of this made it into the show’s final cut. "The framing that it is Republican against Democrat is just so not true. It is all of us against hate. And what I do not stand for is hate."

She added, "Someone who is hateful is definitely not going to be laying in bed next to me, or someone voted for hateful (expletive)" rhetoric. "I was walking out on dates, actually. Everyone's starting their dates with 'What's your favorite color?' I was like, 'So what are your dealbreakers?' I would let them speak, and I would say, 'My dealbreaker is if you voted for this man. So your move.'"

These “Love Is Blind” anecdotes confirm broader statistical studies about dating in the United States. The conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute discovered in 2025 that “six in 10 single women believe that women in the US will be worse off under a second Trump presidency. Most single men do not share these same concerns.”

The study added, “Unsurprisingly, many straight single women are leery of dating men who support Trump. These feelings are especially strong among college-educated single women—nearly three-quarters [73 percent] of whom say they would be less likely to date a Trump supporter.”

Sarah Longwell, a commentator from the conservative website The Bulwark, also observed that focus groups of young people found that men would unprompted raise frustration about not being able to date women if they support Trump.

“There's also, among young men and young women, a level of political divergence — the gap is greater than it's ever been,” Longwell explained. “So you have the vast majority of young women who are more progressive, or who vote for Democrats, and do not support JD Vance and Donald Trump. And young men, on the other hand — not overwhelmingly, but you have a lot more young men who like Donald Trump, who listen to and kind of live in the manosphere podcasting world. And that actually puts a strain on their social relationships, because if a young woman thinks that a young man who votes for Donald Trump is somebody they just don't share values with — that that vote is an indication of not having shared values — that makes dating very hard.”

Pro-Trump women are not alone in struggling to date because they support the MAGA movement. Politico reported that a “31-year-old female administration official described at length her ‘very, very frequent’ scraps with her matches on dating apps. ‘You do the small talk thing, and you have a very good conversation, and then they might say, ‘You didn’t vote for Trump, right?’ As soon as I say, ‘Of course I did,’ it just devolves into all-caps ‘HOW COULD YOU BE SUCH A RACIST AND A BIGOT?’ And ‘You’re going to take away your own birth control.’"

“In many parts of America, your parents would have said to you, ‘Don’t talk politics until you’re way down the pike in your relationship,” Melissa Hobley, chief marketing officer for OkCupid, told the New York Times in 2020. “What’s changed is we see Millennials and Gen Z don’t even want to match with you — let alone talk, go on a date, sleep with you, get in a relationship, get married — they don’t want to match without knowing how you feel about certain issues.”

In 2023 Salon’s Amanda Marcotte argued that the anti-Trump dating tendency among American women is a good thing. Responding to a Washington Post editorial board essay imploring American women to not screen out pro-Trump men, Marcotte wrote that “women's happiness is not actually the concern of the Washington Post editorial board.” Characterizing “their insistence that cross-political marriages will help save the nation from ‘the Trump-era divisions’” as “a gussied-up version of the classic ‘Beauty and the Beast’ fantasy, where a woman's love can turn the brute into a prince,” she said that “it's cruel on its face to expect women to give up their own happiness in hopes they can turn a redhat into a better man through patience and love. But it's also a false hope. It's hard enough to get anyone to change their minds about politics.”

Marcotte concluded, “Trying to get men who already think women are inferior to listen to their liberal wives is a joke.”

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