All In A Name

I have written in the past that I am a "name nerd."

I find names interesting.

You can read some previous posts I have written on names here, here and here.

There usually is a story involved in most names.

Historically, family names have been the predominant means of naming a baby.  That is one of the reasons that if you went back to the 1880's, one in every four boys was named John, William, James or George. One reason--they did not have access to baby name books or the internet. What was the one book people had? The Bible.

A lot has changed in the baby name business in the last 30 or 40 years. The most important change has been the accessibility of information on the internet. Instead of relying on the Bible, family history or a dog-eared baby name book of 1,000 names, you can now peruse 10,000 names at the click of a mouse.

You can also learn exactly how popular the name is, what other people think of it on 7 dimensions (strong? sexy? sophisticated? smart?) and other people's experiences with the name from websites such as Nameberry.

Names are also cyclical coming in and out of favor. Names of friends in my high school years have gotten old and out of favor (Barbara, Nancy, Janet, Keith, Dennis etc) at the same time that names of my grandparents' friends are newly discovered and become popular once again (Olivia, Emma, Clara, Henry, George).

Names also do not generally tell you much about the person who has the name but it can tell you something about the parents (particularly the mother) who chose the name according to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their book Freakanomcs. That book contains an entire chapter on names.

While the above statement is generally true, I have found some interesting data recently that certain names are more or less common in indicating whether that person is a registered Democrat or Republican.

For example, this is a list of the names most likely to be registered as Democrats based on research of voter registration rolls by Zachary Donnini and Havish Netla.

Notice that although this involves the names most likely to be a Democrat they are exclusively female names.

I am going to go out on a limb here and also suggest that these name are almost all African American women.

Neither of those conclusions should be a surprise since women, particularly Black women, are more likely to vote Democrat.

This is a list of the male names that tend to be associated with Democrat registrations.

Of note, Md is short version for Mohammed that is predominantly found in the New York voter rolls.

If you consider all forms of the name Mohammed, Donnini found 82% of the time it was associated with a a Democrat registration.

If we just focus on White registered voter names, these are the most likely to be Democrats.

If you know a Maya, odds are she is a Democrat.

These are the most Republican names.

Again, this list involves all names-male and female.

Notice that all of these names that tilt Republican are male names.

I would also surmise that most are White with a good chance that they were born in the South or Southwest areas of the country.

This should also not be a surprise as White males are voting Republican in large numbers these days.

The list of most Republican female names is particularly interesting.

Female immigrants from Russia and the former Soviet-bloc countries lean heavily to the GOP.

Isn't that interesting?

Do these women know something that other women should be educated about?

Zachary Donnini who compiled this data stated that Karlee, Kassie, Kylee, Rylee, Reagan, Bailee, and Baylee all rank in the Top 25 for GOP female names, but they get bumped from the Top 10 because of those Slavic names.

I am guessing that some of these names might have also been among those young women who famously did those sorority recruitment dance numbers last month.

Link if the video does not open in your browser.

One of the interesting things in looking at the names on the lists above is the wide divergence in the names of Black and White Americans.

This is something that was written about in Freakanomics citing the research of Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. of Harvard University.

Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr.

Fryer has the distinction of being the youngest African American professor (at age 30) to receive tenure at Harvard.

Fryer has spent his career on attempting to understand and quantify the problem of the black achievement gap in America, hoping that hard, scientific data would shed light on the most effective ways to narrow the gap.

One of the questions that Fryer has wrestled with is the virtual segregation of culture between Whites and Blacks in the United States.

They watch different tv shows, they smoke different cigarettes, they like different music as well as the fact that Black parents give their children names that are vastly different from White children.

Fryer came to wonder whether Black culture is a cause of the economic disparity between Blacks and Whites or merely a reflection of it?

Fryer's research found that up until the early 1970's there was significant overlap between Black and White names.

In 1970, a baby girl born in a Black neighborhood was given a name that was only twice as common among Blacks than White.

By 1980 that baby girl received a name that was twenty times more common among Blacks.

There is not any divergence of this magnitude in the names of Asian or Hispanic children compared to Whites.

Such was the influence of the Black Power movement that began in the 1970's where there was a decided trend to celebrate Black culture and disassociate from White culture.

That influence is still very apparent today when looking at the voter registration data compiled by Donnini and Netla.

The unanswered question is the one that Fryer originally set out to unravel.

Is Black culture a cause of economic disparity or merely a reflection of it?

Some questions remain very difficult to answer even after years of study and research.

What we do know is that by just hearing certain names there is a good chance you can discern the politics of that person without knowing anything else about them.