Joe Biden Is Showing Up in a 'Mind-Boggling' Number of D.C.-Area Dating Profiles: 'It's a Conversation-Starter'

"He's really fun-loving — and in me, he brings out my natural smile," one online dating user told the Washington Post of Biden. "I hope people find that attractive"

Photo: Joe Biden/Twitter

Not just once, twice or three times — or even a dozen: No, according to a tongue-in-cheek report published Tuesday in The Washington Post, former Vice President Joe Biden has been popping up all over online dating profiles in the Washington, D.C., area.

The form of his appearances can vary, per the Post. Sometimes it’s in joint selfies with dating app users and, in others, it’s a playful mention of a Biden-esque ethos (“Trying to be the Bidenest I can be”). In one 23-year-old user’s case, he used a photo of a youthful Biden because, he said, he’d been told the two look alike.

“It was a likable joke to have at the end there,” the user, Andreas Elterich, told the Post. “I’m not trying to trick people. It’s a conversation-starter.”

Another user who spoke to the paper, a 20-something named Max (first name only), also includes Biden in his profile.

“He’s really fun-loving — and in me, he brings out my natural smile,” Max said. “I hope people find that attractive.”

Twenty-two-year-old José Fontanez, meanwhile, said Biden was essentially a signal of bipartisanship for possible matches — and, more simply, just a byproduct of excitement.

“When I put the Biden picture up, my mentality was: I’m a 22-year-old and I got to meet the vice president. But I will date a Republican, I will date a liberal,” said Fontanez, who according to the Post has also taken photos with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Donald Trump.

The Post‘s Leigh Giangreco, who explored the Biden dating-profile phenomenon, said she personally came across him a “mind-boggling” amount of times in various dating profiles — at least 11.

What’s more, Giangreco wrote, “One woman sent me a zip file filled with 23 men’s profiles she’d gathered from Tinder, Bumble and the League featuring Biden in all his various incarnations: the cozy selfie; the photo bomb; the official grip-and-grin set against a navy backdrop, flanked by American flags.”

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Giangreco linked Biden’s local popularity with what his public persona (“pleasant and cool, if a little vanilla for some”) means in such polarizing times, especially in the nation’s capital. As one relationship expert told her: “People’s identity has become very intertwined to politics and especially in D.C.”

Another dynamic is almost surely at work: Biden has remained so public in part because he is widely believed to be preparing another bid for the presidency.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that he “told at least a half-dozen supporters … he intends to run for president.” (Still, according the Journal, “People around him caution[ed] that he could change his mind.”)

In December, Biden said he would make a decision about running within two months.

“I’ll be as straight with you as I can: I think I’m the most qualified person in the country to be president,” he said then, during a December appearance at the University of Montana. “The issues that we face as a country today are the issues that have been in my wheelhouse, that I’ve worked on my whole life.”

Despite an official announcement, Biden has been maneuvering as though he will be challenging President Trump.

On Tuesday night he reportedly addressed his central role in giving a public hearing for Anita Hill, who in the ’90s accused Clarence Thomas, then a nominee for the Supreme Court, of sexual harassment. Thomas has always vigorously denied Hill’s account.

In the intervening years, and especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Hill’s allegations and her treatment at the time have been re-examined — which Biden acknowledged in his Tuesday comments, saying per the Associated Press:

“To this day I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to give her the kind of hearing she deserved. I wish I could have done something.”