Underwood Trumps Trump
About 4 weeks ago, we rolled out our very first filter pack for profile photos: Election Filters. Since we’re all about combating societal stereotypes, we were eager to shake up the discourse and get the conversation started. This is our own in-app version of the U.S. Primary Election.
We introduced 10 filters, ranging from the top 2 delegates for the Democratic and Republican parties to a range of more lighthearted subjects. We couldn’t wait to compile the data on these filters.
We have nearly 5 million users, 80% of whom are between 18-35 years old. We broke the insights down by state, age, gender, education level, and more. The results provide us with fascinating insight into the minds of our daters and voters.
The biggest surprise was how well some of our comical filters performed: Underwood for President beat every other filter by a landslide. It was both the most used and the most right swiped in general. The popularity of a fictional ticket for Francis and Claire Underwood from Netflix’s House of Cards shows the popularity of pop culture as it relates to politics. Despite this duo being both murderous and Machiavellian, they won by a landslide in our polls.
Among other interesting upsets were "Pizza for President" receiving more right swipes than our Trump filter. This is despite the fact that Trump “won” 8 of our states by being used most in those locations. "#IDGAF" left all Republican filters in the dust in both application and right swipes. Bernie Sanders has widely been considered by mainstream media as a runaway hit among millennials, but Hillary took 3 more states in our stats.
The filters also affected the way people behaved in the app. Since we separated our data into how often a filter was used (biggest number of uses meant that filter “won” the state) vs. how many right swipes that filter got, we were able to find what types of users matched with others.
For someone who selected a Democratic filter, they had a 77% swipe left rate on those with Republican-facing filters. For those who chose a Republican filter, they were over 90% sure to swipe left on Democratic filters.
Trump was 66% more likely to be left swiped than any other filter. Republicans seemed to band together. Cruz and Trump had over 25,000 joint matches. (This means one person was using a Cruz filter, and the other user had chosen a Trump filter.) The most adamantly opposed based on match rate? No surprise there — Sanders and Trump.
We saw some great proof of concept in the way women interacted with filters. A woman was 34% more likely to right swipe on a man who had a filter applied. For women who were using a filter themselves, 90% of their right swipes were given to profiles using similar filters. This shows that when a woman openly cares about her candidate of choice and isn’t nervous to wear it on her *digital* sleeve, she sought out like-minded individuals. They were inclined to like her back.
Additionally, match rates also went up 2x in general when each party was using a filter. Male to male matches soared when filters were applied, making male to male matches 3x more likely with a filter.
On a lighter note: Underwood and Pizza had the highest match rates between the two filters.
Unsurprisingly, we found that politics are important to our users. While politics may seem a heavy topic for a first interaction, it helps people connect by relating to one another beyond a profile photo or common friend.
A political stance says a lot about a person. Politics represent entire value sets, lifestyle choices, passions, and beliefs, making choosing a potential partner or friend much easier if you care about their stance. Whether you're looking to make connections with like-minded individuals or to discuss the election with those who hold opposite opinions, filters make a difference.
In what may be our most notable piece of data, there was absolutely no increase in any kind of chat abuse or abusive language among parties who were not closely aligned in values. Bumble users continued to be kind and respectful of one another, even on hot button issues.
Oh, and Kanye - according to our data, you really may have a chance amongst millennial voters if you decide to run for office in 2020. Godspeed.
For more information on our election filters, email us! feedback@team.bumble.com