This article says whether certain common names are most likely to lean Democratic or Republican (by registration). Although one might guess this is close to 50-50, it ain’t. Just as many medical specialties lean one way or the other, there are differences between common, “ethnic” and “traditional biblical” names.
The article link is here. Gift links have been pretty limited recently so will consider adding more on request, to unknown effect.
Something’s fishy, here. Among all "Daniel"s, there’s a 23-point Democratic lean. But among all male "Daniel"s, there’s a 7-point Republican lean. Now, part of that can be explained by the fact that men, overall, lean more Republican than women… but the overwhelming majority of "Daniel"s (which is distinct from “Danielle” or the like) are male, so the “all Daniels” figure should be very, very close to the “all male Daniels” figure.
Their tables also show that, among the most common names, there’s a very strong Democratic lean (out of the top 30 surnames, one is Republican, one is completely neutral, and the other 28 are all Democratic, for instance), and they never explore the reason for that.
Yeah, I would expect the numbers to be far closer to even than they seem to be, especially for common first names. It’s one thing if you name your kid “Reagan”. If it might be true there are many Mormons monikered “Mark”, moreover maybe multiple multistate “Marks” mitigate modest municipal moments. Said otherwise, most states are reasonably close to parity and cities probably trend Democratic, so the effects for common names should be pretty small. Generational effects might matter more if monikered “Muriel”…. even if some men lean Republican and some women don’t these days.
Most people with my first name are about my age too. Like wearing belted onions it was the fashion at the time.
There are French and German forms of my name. In the German form, which is what I use, it has an 8 point Republican lean, and in the French form it has a 28 point Dem lean.
That actually seemed … less surprising once I looked at the list and thought about it? There are more Ds than Rs in the US to begin with, so you’d expect a name that isn’t correlated with any other marker of partisan affiliation to have a slight D lean, maybe in the 2-5 point range. (Indeed, this is true for a few of the names in the top 30: Anderson, Clark, Smith.) But most names are correlated with another marker of partisan affiliation: ethnicity. It’s not too hard to figure out why, for example, Garcia and Rodriguez would skew D, but I suspect that while there are plenty of white people in the US with the other names on this list, black people are overrepresented. (This is really obvious with “Williams,” “Jackson,” and “Robinson,” all of which have an overwhelming D lean, but most of the other non-Hispanic names in the top 30 are very common names of English origin. Which means they’re the sort of names that were probably common in the antebellum South as well.)
FWIW, my own last name (mostly held by Irish-Americans who immigrated in the 1840s or later) skews D by 3 points, which is pretty much in line with the country as a whole. (My first name is D by 38 points, which I was not expecting; but “people with female names that are traditional but not super-common” might actually be a fairly reliable D demographic, now that I think about it.)
Another one I noticed was “Washington”. There are very, very few of them with a familial link to George, but Presidential names were a common choice among newly-freed slaves who didn’t want to use their former master’s name, so Washingtons are overwhelmingly black.
Though, “Jackson” and “Johnson” and “Jefferson” were also often chosen, for the same reason, so while those names are fairly common for whites, they’re probably still disproportionately black.
Where is everybody finding a place to check their name in the linked article? I scrolled and scrolled and couldn’t find anything.
ETA: Ah, i found it. The formatting was mangled totally in Chrome, but opening the link in Safari cleaned it up.
So my first name is a 0. Dead middle-of-the-road. My last name is not in the database (including the more detailed one). Neither my wife’s first nor last names are in the database, either.
Where are you seeing an “all” table? There’s a last name table, then women’s first names, then men’s first names. Women’s first names shows -23 for Daniel, and men shows +7 for the same. Maybe you conflated the women’s table for all?