Red and Blue Names

I have written in these pages before about the interesting background on the names that parents give their children.

You can find earlier content on names here , here and here that I wrote about in BeeLine.

I became particularly interested in this subject when I read the book Freakanomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner about 20 years ago.

Freakanomics has an entire chapter on names.

One major conclusion of the authors is that a name by itself never reveals much about the person that holds it.

After all, they were not involved in the naming process.

However, it does reveal a lot about the parents, particularly the mother.

You often can discern a lot about the parents just by the name---their socioeconomic class, race, ethnicity, education level, etc.

Based on some recent data I have seen, you might also be able to discern their political affiliation.

For example, these are the ten baby boy names that have the highest prevalence of being found in Democrat leaning (Blue) states as compiled by the baby name website Nameberry.

Here is a list of the ten baby boy names that are more likely to be found in Republican leaning (Red) states.

Those names do seem to tell us a lot about the parents naming these boys.

Here are the "Blue" baby names for girls.

And the "Red"baby names for girls.

There is also recent data that shows the most prevalent names for registered Democrats and Republicans based on age groups.

These are the names in which you are most likely to find a Democrat voter based on voter registration rolls.

One big fact that the authors of Freakanomics found in their research was how little overlap there was between white and black names.

I would hazard a guess that it is unlikely that there are very many white voters in the list above.

Conversely, there was a great deal of overlap between white and Asian American names.

This is the list for Republican leaning names.

I would doubt that there are very many minorities in those names.

One thing I did learn in looking at the list above is that I seem to have been ahead of my time by about 20 years.

I also had no idea that the Jolene that Dolly Parton sang about, in addition to having beauty beyond compare with flaming lock of auburn hair, was most likely a Republican!

Here is an  AI generated images (by Grok) of what a young Jolene might look like in a MAGA hat.

Dolly, we better understand why you were imploring Jolene to not take your man!