For anyone who also stumbled across this when comparing a dataframe date to a variable date, and this did not exactly answer your question; you can use the code below.
Instead of:
self.df["date"] = pd.to_datetime(self.df["date"])
You can import datetime and then add .dt.date to the end like:
self.df["date"] = pd.to_datetime(self.df["date"]).dt.date