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Who’s your presidential sweetheart? Tinder gets political with ‘Swipe the Vote’

Results from Tinder's Swipe the Vote show Sanders, Cruz leading

tinder during snow storms
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Dating on Tinder not getting you anywhere? No worries, Tinder is giving you something else to do if you’re bored with trying to find someone to hook up/mate for life with — finding your presidential candidate.tinder

If you’re still undecided on which candidate you want to run the United States, the popular dating app is offering a new feature that lets you swipe left or right on certain issues, such as if you want to “keep same-sex marriage legal” or “abolish the death penalty.” Each one of these cards offers more contextual information when you click on them.

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For example, clicking on the same-sex card will teach you that, “the U.S. legalized gay marriage across all 50 states on June 26, 2015, making it the 21st and most populous country to legalize gay marriage.”

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Updated on 03/28/2016 by Julian Chokkattu: Added in some preliminary results from Tinder.

Tinder has published a few early results from its Swipe the Vote campaign, and it looks like people on the dating service favor Senators Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz over the other candidates.

The race is close between Sanders and Hillary Clinton, though, as the Vermont senator is only beating the former secretary of state by 200 matches. Cruz beat his Republican rival with 14.3 percent of overall votes, while Donald Trump only got 8.1 percent.

The results found that more women matched with Sanders, while the majority of males matched with Clinton. More men leaned to the right — almost twice as often as women. Check out the full breakdown of the numbers here.

Swipe the Vote features 10 issues, and once you swipe left or right on all of them you will be matched with a presidential candidate who best represents your views. You can see how you did compared to other candidates, and also learn more about each candidate by tapping on their cards. Of course, you’re given the option to share your matched candidate — but more importantly, Tinder has collaborated with nonprofit Rock the Vote to provide an easier way and incentive to register to vote.

tinder match
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Tinder says its new feature was built with Wedgies, a polling platform, and the data on the candidates and issues comes from another app called Voter. Voter launched last September and essentially has the same function as Swipe the Vote, as it lets users match themselves with a candidate and offers more robust information on them, and the issues they stand for.

“Our goal has always been to help as many people as possible become informed,” said Voter co-founder Hunter Scarborough. “So leveraging something like Tinder’s massive, massive audience to do that was a super exciting opportunity and we definitely didn’t want to pass that up … If [people] want some deeper results and more refined personalization, they can go directly to Voter.”

It’s also clear that Tinder became interested in adding politics into its dating app after various people and groups began using Tinder to campaign for candidates like Sanders and former candidate Senator Marco Rubio.

You should be able to see a “Swipe the Vote” video card some time today as you swipe through people in the app.

Julian Chokkattu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…
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