A bombshell has entered the villa: your U.S. Senate candidate.
On Senate Island, the islanders are politicians and the connection they want to explore is between you and their policy platform. Into someone whose ideal first date is house hunting? Maybe you’d like Democrat James Talarico in Texas, who wants to offer down payment assistance to first-time home buyers. Or maybe your love language is a child tax credit of up to $4,400 — then Republican Ken Paxton may be your guy.
Check out their profile, couple up and make a voting plan. Forget The Hideaway; this election season, we’re heading to the polls.
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Senate Island, a parody website designed to look and feel like the app for the popular dating show “Love Island,” launched last week and has since gone viral on TikTok. In part it’s the novelty of seeing candidates’ platforms presented like a dating profile. But it’s also because the website is the exact kind of resource that can actually engage young voters who may be disillusioned this midterm cycle.
“I work in civic engagement! Do you? If not, we need you for 2028!” one user wrote on Senate Island creator Anweih Cox’s video introducing the website.
The idea for it first popped in Cox’s head over the summer while she was watching the most recent season of the show’s U.S. edition. In between watching Kenzie Annis’ “clam slam” and Melanie Moreno’s crash out, Cox kept thinking how more than a million users log in to the “Love Island” app every week to vote for their favorite islanders. Why couldn’t they translate that interest into the upcoming election? Could there be a better way to engage them while having some fun?
Cox — an art director and designer and owner of TRNSCND, a creative studio “for the culture” — jotted down an idea in her Notes app. Midterm island or voting island. Casa Amor can be the candidate comparison.
She didn’t think about it again until Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate from Michigan, posted a “Love Island”-style candidate video at the end of August.
“So what’s my type?” he said in the TikTok. “No corporate PAC money. Ready to rock for Medicare for All.” He captioned the video, “Senate Island, here we come.”
Cox is 30, on the border of Gen Z, and she’s seen how disconnected some younger people are from politics. For her, this was a way to build that connection.
“What I see from a lot of Gen Z is … a lot of hopelessness as it relates to politics and making an impact and feeling like they matter in a sense.” The message Cox wanted to send was: “Your voice and your vote can build towards the future that we want to see.”
In mid-October, with the midterms around the corner, Cox decided to go for it. She ran the idea by her friends first (feedback was “you’re absolutely crazy and unhinged”) and then started to build out the site after work and on the weekend.
It launched October 26. Here’s how it works:
First you enter your villa (state) and meet your islanders (the candidates). To get a more detailed understanding of the candidates, you can “explore your connections” to see their stances on major issues including education, healthcare, housing, AI and the cost of living, stacked side-by-side. Cox kept it to only Senate races to make it more manageable to build.
Each candidate is styled similarly — men in a white shirt and khakis, women in black blazers — but she did initially consider whether to put El-Sayed, the first candidate she designed, in swim trunks. Cox wrote candidates’ political stances in a cheeky, nonpartisan fashion. In the race between Democrat Angie Nixon and Republican Ashley Moody in Florida, the site lists each candidates’ stance on the cost of living:
- Nixon: Swipe right if you’re tired of price gouging. I’ve pushed for a $15 minimum wage, I want Trump-era tariffs repealed, and billionaires should pay their fair share.
- Moody: My love language: No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime and No Tax on Social Security. I’ll also cut government waste and protect small businesses from burdensome regulations.
On the show, this next step would be Casa Amor — the phase in the competition where participants are put into a brand new villa with brand new singles to test whether they want to recouple with someone else. Choose your candidate and recouple, but unlike in the show, your vote is final: The website warns that, “Once you couple up, there’s no recoupling. No Casa Amor do-overs.”
In the final screen, users get a list of links to prepare for Election Day, including how to check voter registration status, find a polling place and get more information on all candidates. A “save the date on your calendar” link populates a calendar reminder on your phone.
The site also features a rotating daily poll about election issues. On November 2, the top response to, “What issue is the main priority?” was affordable housing (edging out healthcare, AI and gas prices, in that order).
Cox designed the screens herself using “Love Island” fonts and colors and collected the data on candidates’ positions from their websites and news articles. She input it into the AI assistant Claude to fact check and stylize the platforms to make them sound like they would on a dating app. Claude also helped her duplicate the pages for every state.
Her goal was to get 1,000 page views.
As of Election Day, she’s had more than half a million page views, over 80,000 site visitors and 40,000-plus responses to the daily polls.
The best comments on TikTok have been from people who were planning to sit out the election because they were overwhelmed by the process of parsing through candidate platforms, worried they would make the wrong choice or checked out from politics altogether.
Cox said multiple people have told her they’ve used the website as a starting point to be able to research their candidates.
“It’s important because a lot of times people feel very intimidated,” she said. “You have to go through all these different sites sometimes just to hunt down the information you’re looking for, and so just having that starting resource that is on the more playful side just makes it feel less intimidating.”
She doesn’t know yet if she’ll build it out further for the presidential elections in 2028 (“Let’s get through the midterms first,” she said with a laugh), but she recently got two big seals of approval:
Abdul El-Sayed liked her video introduction on TikTok. And Ariana Madix, the host of “Love Island,” dropped a comment. “you are brilliant,” she said, with a glitter pink heart emoji.
To check your voter registration status or to get more information about how to vote and what’s on your ballot, visit vote.org.
