America: Will You Accept These Bros?
By Maura Foley
Despite living in the golden age of television, my preferred TV does not ask for critical thinking (I do enough of that working as a Data Scientist at Civis). “Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break from Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show” was clearly written about me. The promised land of guilty-pleasure viewing is The Bachelor and Bachelorette series, which provides the American public with the romantic fantasies in tropical locales we all need to get through these tough modern times. Watch what happens when the real world butts in: Bachelor(ette) Twitter went apoplectic when it was interrupted not once, but two times by Donald Trump.
If you’re also a member of Bachelor Nation (BN), you know that as a season winds down, the speculation on who the next Bachelor(ette) will be heats up. Vulture is even setting the odds on who’s next on the docket for love. I work with several members of BN, and we’ve been having rousing debates about who should be the next Bachelor. Being a data science company, someone smartly pointed out that we could ask America too! We field thousands of surveys a week to support our syndicated products, so it’s easy for us to add on questions for a few weeks at a time to satisfy our own curiosity or help a cause we believe in. In anticipation of Tuesday’s announcement of next season’s Bachelor, we asked ~3,000 members of the American public who they’d choose.
Typically the next season’s Bachelor(ette) is an (often jilted) contestant from a previous season. Some are universally adored, and some, well… aren’t. We went into the study expecting it to be a contest among popular suitors from the most recent season of Bachelorette: Blake, Garrett, Jason and Wills (we fielded this survey before the season completed, so Becca had not yet picked Garrett as her fiancé). What we found surprised us: It’s time to pick a regular human being again. Among those with an opinion, over half (51%) of respondents thought a non-famous person should be the next Bachelor. Among those without a college degree, this opinion is more prevalent, with 53% of non-college graduates wanting a non-famous Bachelor.
For those looking for an already-known Bachelor, Blake is the favorite, garnering 28% of the vote among those who want a known entity. Following Blake is Jason with 25%, Garrett at 20% and Wills at 11%.
Who isn’t a Blake fan? Divorced respondents were five times less likely to select Blake than single, married or widowed respondents. Blake also loses out among men, who were more likely to select Jason.
We also let respondents suggest a new potential Bachelor if they didn’t like any of the current frontrunners. I sincerely hope an ABC producer is reading this and takes one of these suggestions: Ru Paul (yas queen!), Michael B Jordan (DOUBLE yes), Ryan Seacrest (hrmmm, maybe not), Dave Franco (ok?), Ser Gregor Clegane (he seems busy with dragons), and Peter (how could we forget him?!).
