The ‘blue wave’ has made straight women more optimistic about dating

On Nov. 3, left-leaning Americans felt something that had lain dormant for a long time: hope.

The U.S. midterm elections resulted in historic wins, including Democrats flipping seats in several states. After the gut-punch of Trump’s second win in 2024, and the subsequent human rights abuses and skyrocketing costs in the last two years, the “blue wave” (or bluenami, bluke, however you’d like to refer to it) swept over many of us like a calming balm. 

The election results haven’t just caused democratic optimism (or millennial optimism). For some women who date men, it has also bubbled over into romantic optimism.

“I’m hopeful that with a shift in politics and culture, the values of individuals and groups will start to shift too,” Bailey Cummings, a 27-year-old communications and marketing specialist based in Nashville, told Mashable over Instagram DM. 

Is heteropessimism fading?

The past few years have been less than stellar for heterosexuals. In 2019, writer and researcher Asa Seresin coined “heteropessimism,” or feelings of shame, regret, and hopelessness when it comes to straight romance. The feeling seems to have only gotten worse since then, paving the way for 2025’s “heterofatalism.” The novelty of dating apps has long worn off, the debate over whether to engage in casual sex rages on, and having a boyfriend is embarrassing.

It doesn’t help that young men and women have, at least in the past decade, held diverging ideological views. Men were becoming more conservative in the U.S. and elsewhere, and women more liberal. Politics are more polarized than ever, and the polarization carries over into our love lives.

“I’m on Hinge primarily, and if it says ‘not political’ or ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative’ in anyone’s profile, regardless of their gender, I’m not gonna meet up with that person,” said Ellie Rudy, a bisexual 27-year-old freelance journalist in Brooklyn.

Men under 30 had a 23-point shift to the right in the 2024 presidential election. But last Tuesday, they swung back nearly 40 points to the Democrats, the New York Times reported.

“After being told that men were basically a lost generation and that they’d been eaten up by the manosphere and Andrew Tate and were impossible to capture, we saw the opposite happen,” journalist and author Liz Plank told Mashable.

Writer Magdalene J. Taylor proposed “hetero-optimism” in a New York Times op-ed back in May, but it’s looking more relevant than ever.

That being said, Plank noted that while the results were uplifting, there’s still a big divide between men and women.

The political gender divide

A 2024 Financial Times article argues that the #MeToo movement, which peaked in 2017 and 2018, was the trigger for the gender divide among Gen Z. In the years since, differences of opinion have expanded beyond the issue of sexual violence and into politics (like immigration), marriage, and children. 

Meanwhile, manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate sold a gender essentialist, traditional worldview to young men in which they are victims of feminism. Men, to Tate and others, should dominate women and be “alphas.” 

These misogynistic talking points align with the online incel (involuntary celibate) community, which rose from a fringe movement into the mainstream consciousness, especially since 2020. Incel forums fostered the looksmaxxing trend and its totem, the influencer Clavicular, who was recently charged with rape. As Mashable’s deputy digital culture editor Olivia Tauber wrote in Sept., Clavicular built a following by humiliating women.

Far-right influencers aligned themselves with Donald Trump, and it’s easy to see why women reject this outlook.

“What we’ve seen lately is this dominant political model of, ‘This is what it means to be a man, and you have to behave this way, and we don’t necessarily believe that women have the same rights or the same freedom to different roles,'” Sarah Ketay, a social and health psychologist at the University of Hartford, told Mashable. “My personal take is that a lot of women don’t appreciate that.”

And, regardless of age, the Pew Research Center found in a 2024 report that men are more likely than women to associate with the Republican Party.

But despite whatever far-right influencers spew, men and women aren’t actually that different, Ketay argued.

“What we found in social psychology is that men and women often want exactly the same thing. They want partners who are kind to each other, who pay attention to them, who care about them,” Ketay said. 

The issues lie in how men are socialized, she continued. Generally, men are socialized to suppress their emotions except anger, and they’re not taught to pay attention to how other people feel. This doesn’t help heterosexual relationships. And these aren’t inherent differences, Ketay said, but instead differences in how men and women are raised.

“Heterosexual relationships are actually at a disadvantage, not because of anything like biological, but because of how we’re socialized,” she said.

But there is good news: Positive qualities, like communication and awareness of other people’s feelings, can be learned. And they don’t have to be learned to be ready for a relationship, Ketay said; they can be learned while you’re in one. 

“I hope people can be a little bit more optimistic,” she said, and some are.

A cautious optimism

Rudy told Mashable that she’s cautiously optimistic. While she is disappointed in men she personally interacts with and men as a larger group, she feels hopeful. Though, she did point out that she’s encountered leftist men who vote Democrat but act misogynistic and homophobic behind closed doors.

“There’s something that’s particularly frightening about liberal men who initially can make women feel safe, and then once you get to know them better, you realize it’s all just a facade,” she said. She’s also dating more women than men right now.

Another bi woman, 31-year-old New Jersey resident Kaitlyn Porter, told Mashable over DM she doesn’t feel more hopeful, because this is just the beginning. “We are leaps and bounds before men treat women as equals. I think it’s nice to see them voting for the collective, but there’s so much more that needs to be done,” said Porter, a State Judiciary staff member.

Plank said there’s a pessimistic view of the election that men thought gas prices were too high and decided to vote left, and it’s not an ideological shift. But there’s also a more optimistic view: That white men have realized that what Black women and other women have been organizing for decades to achieve can benefit them as well (as Plank wrote on her Substack).

A bluer America is better for daters

While Plank believes men and women are in very different places, elections can give us a different understanding of a demographic we thought was unchangeable, or dynamics believed to be set in stone.

The 2026 midterms were a single election, and we don’t know how it will impact us. But, given the policy platforms of the winners, there might be truth behind the “baby boom in 9 months” jokes.

“I think single straight women should feel more hopeful about all this!” Steffi Cao, a 28-year-old dating advice columnist and culture writer in New York City, told Mashable over Instagram DM.

Cao believes that the political divide between young, straight men and women is fueled by limited access to resources. These developments give her hope that change is possible. “Think about how the happiest countries are ones with strong social programs, and there’s a correlation between marriage satisfaction and healthcare access,” she said. Some Democrats, especially Michigan’s Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, campaigned on Medicare for All this election cycle.

“I’m not saying that things will change overnight,” she said, “but I am more hopeful that with these incoming structural changes, culture has more potential to shift as young men can realize it was never immigrants or women or trans athletes that were preventing them from their own success, but rather [the] system that promised them things and never delivered.”

Ketay also mentioned that politicians and their social programs can help improve relationships and families. She cited New York City’s free babysitting program, which provides childcare for a “parents’ night out.”

In recent years, singles have said that the rising cost of living is just another reason dating is harder. They can’t afford dinner and drinks, let alone move out of their parents’ home and buy their own. 

But maybe politicians who want to get money out of politics, provide free healthcare, and tax billionaires could balance the economic scales somewhat and make every aspect of American life — including finding a partner — that much easier.