In the dating world, Donald Trump has emerged as a litmus test for singles hoping to filter out potential mates. | Getty How Donald Trump changed the dating world The Republican nominee is a litmus test for singles who abhor Trump’s rise.

Politics, said Katie Oldenburg, is like an ex-boyfriend — you don’t bring it up on the first date.

Or so it used to go. This historically divisive election year has prompted Oldenburg, a 29-year-old public relations specialist who lives in New York City, to make a new dating rule: no Donald Trump supporters.


“Talking about politics on a first date is a big no-no,” she said. “But given the state of affairs and how awful things have been, I’ve made a conscious effort to try and determine if I’m on the same page as whomever I’m dating at the time.”

She added: “Just because Donald Trump’s comments have been so repulsive and disgusting that I don’t even want to be on a date with somebody who supports that person.”

Trump and his demagogic presidential campaign have proven to be a major friction point in friendships, family relationships and even some marriages, as Americans grapple with one of the ugliest, most polarizing elections in American history.

But in the dating world, Trump has emerged – in a twisted way – as a something of a helpful force, serving as a litmus test for singles hoping to filter out potential mates who find the billionaire’s message appealing.

And some women say that filter has become even more imperative since the early October release of a 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump was caught on a hot mic boasting about being able to grab women’s genitals without consequence because he’s “a star.”

To Oldenburg, who plans to vote for Hillary Clinton, supporting Trump even after the tape surfaced is tantamount to excusing that behavior. She has dated Republicans before, she said, but actively avoids anyone voting for the party’s nominee this year. If she comes across an online dating profile that mentions support for Trump, she swipes left; on a date, she works the election into the conversation, just to make sure.

“I think it’s one thing to be a Republican, and it’s one thing to support Donald Trump,” Oldenburg said. “They’re two different things. I think one is about viewpoints and having specific opinions about how things are handled, and then another is you’re backing up a misogynistic dictator who has no respect for women.”

“It’s a character and morals thing,” she added, “more than it is a politics thing.”

That’s an unforgiving assessment, but Oldenburg is not alone. Laurie Davis Edwards, the Los Angeles-based founder of eFlirt, a company that advises people on their online dating practices, had observed a recent uptick in clients bringing up concerns about their dates’ opinions on the election, even before the “Access Hollywood” tape upended the race.

Like Oldenburg, many clients would go out with someone new and break what Edwards called the “old adage” of not talking about politics on the first date. “And then they’ll come back and say, ‘Oh, my God, I just went on a date with a Trump supporter. I can’t believe it,’” she recounted.

“Especially of late, politics has been a huge part of it,” Edwards said in an interview before the tape surfaced.

After the recording came out, she added by email: “I would imagine that with sexual assault charges in place, women will be less forgiving of dating Trump supporters.”

Nancy Slotnick, a dating coach, agrees that the tape and the accusations that followed have changed the dynamic. She generally advises women to try to read a date’s character, and she said some women might see a defense of Trump in the wake of the tape as a red flag.

Other women recount similar stories, from both before and after the tape surfaced. Shannon Lell, a 38-year-old freelance writer in Seattle who recently described the 2016 dating scene in The Washington Post, said she was “blindsided” when she realized she was on a date with a Trump supporter earlier this year.

“He started to apologize for some of Donald Trump’s stances, like the way he projects himself, or his personality or the things he’s said about women. And it was really difficult to keep it together,” Lell said in a phone interview, also before the tape came out. “I did my best; I tried not to get up and walk away or get angry. I got animated, I would say, at a certain point.”

There was no second date.

For Liz Chambers, a 26-year-old New Yorker who works in PR, supporting Trump would be a “deal-breaker” in any prospective relationship, given his insults of women and immigrants. For that reason, when a man she had gone out with once before asked her if it would be weird to spend their second date watching the third presidential debate, she agreed.

“I basically figured, yes, it’s a little weird, but if he’s crazy, I might as well figure it out now,” Chambers said.

She needn’t worry: He assured her that he was not voting for Trump, and she enjoyed the date, watching Clinton and Trump debate in Las Vegas from a wine bar in the East Village.

Some Trump supporters, for their part, seem to agree that their candidate has complicated their dating lives. A California Trump voter created a dating website earlier this year specifically geared toward the Republican nominee’s supporters, titled trumpsingles.com (“Make dating great again”), in part to address that gap.

The founder of Trump Singles, David Goss, is married, but his Trump-supporting friends’ struggles on the dating market inspired him to build the site. One friend of a friend mentioned her support for Trump on a date, Goss said, and was promptly deserted at the table, left to foot the bill and all.

The site launched in May and had some 12,000 paid subscribers as of late September, according to Goss. Like Trump’s support base nationally, the membership skewed male — about 63 percent men to 37 percent women — but was geographically clustered in blue cities like New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Goss, who could not be reached for further comment after the “Access Hollywood” video surfaced in early October, attributed that in part to what he described as the isolating experience of being a Trump supporter in heavily Democratic areas.

“Everyone’s divided now, and there’s so much of it that a Trump supporter doesn’t even want to associate with a Clinton supporter, and a Clinton supporter doesn’t want to associate with a Trump supporter anymore,” Goss said. “They’re definitely not going to be going on dates together.”

Perhaps proving his point, the site prompted this headline in The Cut, a women’s blog run by New York Magazine: “Trump Singles Is the Newest Dating Site You Can Actively Avoid.”

“Should you be looking for the complete opposite of that, there’s always Maple Match, the service looking to facilitate your move to Canada,” the blog offered.