What your name says about your politics

[BMT (RIP)]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/02/27/what-your-name-says-about-your-politics/?hpid=z5

BMT

[Richard]

Wow - interesting but kinda scary at the same time to know somebody is tracking so much finite data on us all.

There are 2,046,610 registered voters named Richard, making it the 8th most common name.

Party identification: 54% Rep 46% Dem

Probability that voters named Richard:

Have a gun in their house - 49%
Attend religious services weekly - 53.2%
Have a college degree - 53.6%

Richard

[PSM]

The comments are great! There are people actually named Velveeta and Semen. :D

Pat

[Airbornelawyer]

Wow - interesting but kinda scary at the same time to know somebody is tracking so much finite data on us all.
The only thing being tracked, per se, is voter registration, which is publicly available from state filings. The other items are based on polling or other incomplete sources.

And voter registration, for that matter, is an incomplete source. 22 states do not include party affiliation in voter registrations. These states run the gamut from strongly red (Texas, Utah, Idaho) to purple (Virginia, Ohio, Missouri) to strongly blue (Illinois, Vermont, Hawaii), so maybe it averages out somewhat, but that means even the party ID is a statistician's extrapolation rather than finite data. Further, eight of the 11 former Confederate states do not include party affiliation, so it is possible many traditionally Southern names are not completely accurately represented.

Also, party affiliation itself is not necessarily an accurate predictor of voting behavior. After the 2004 election, partisan hack Keith Olbermann notoriously claimed that the results from Florida must have been rigged, because Bush won many counties with high Democratic Party affiliations. He cited Baker County, west of Jacksonville, specifically. This displayed his none-too-surprising ignorance of the South, since anyone who knows anything about places like Baker County knows that while southern Democrats may maintain their party affiliations, they aren't voting for progressive or liberal Democrat candidates.

Here are the results for the 8 most common male and 5 most common female names, which show variances which are probably not outside the margins of error, with very few outliers.

1 51.4 48.6 47.2 51.7 56.2
2 53.3 46.7 49.5 51.9 55.0
3 52.9 47.1 50.4 54.8 52.5
4 53.3 46.7 49.3 52.8 53.4
5 52.9 47.1 48.7 53.4 55.7
6 53.8 46.2 50.2 53.5 53.0
8 54.0 46.0 49.0 53.2 53.6
9 54.1 45.9 49.1 52.8 55.5

7 45.3 54.7 56.8 36.1 49.3
11 45.6 54.4 55.0 36.7 50.0
14 47.6 52.4 55.5 40.6 49.6
18 46.8 53.2 55.8 36.7 49.2
19 45.0 55.0 53.8 33.3 54.9

[Airbornelawyer]

"There are 30 registered voters named Hitler"
"There are 312 registered voters named Stalin"
"There are 15 registered voters named Mussolini"

That's as a first name! Though...

"There are 156 registered voters named Nacho"
"There are 11 registered voters named Tarantula"
"There are 18 registered voters named Freckles"

[BryanK]

"There are 30 registered voters named Hitler"
"There are 312 registered voters named Stalin"
"There are 15 registered voters named Mussolini"

That's as a first name! Though...

"There are 156 registered voters named Nacho"
"There are 11 registered voters named Tarantula"
"There are 18 registered voters named Freckles"

I'm sure those folks pay taxes.

"Hello, may I please speak with Nacho....Nacho Bell Grande? :D

[NurseTim]

Type in Afrocentric names and see what you get. BTW, there are 203 registered voters named virgin, no vagina, I checked.

They have me down as half a commie. I hope it's the fat half, won't miss that miserable son of a bitch.:D

[Scimitar]

lol.

Name - Buck - Nigel
Republican - 57.2% - 28.3%
Highest Political affiliation - 98.5th % Republican - 91.7th % Democrat
Gun - 49.3% - 45.2%
Weekly Service - 61.4% - 39.9%
College - 47.4% - 55.6%

[Mr Furious]

IMO - it belongs on Buzzfeed versus the Post.

Here’s an Earth shattering surprise – the creators of the poll are 100% Dem and former BHO campaign analyst. Wow, I'm shocked!:rolleyes:

http://www.claritycampaigns.com/team/#our-team

[Richard]

The Amazon.com for campaign software. ;)

http://www.capterra.com/political-campaign-software

Richard

[Lan]

I wasn't able to find any far right leaning results by using traditional names given to people from the Greatest generation, or the Silent generation, but managed to find a bunch of left leaning by Hispanic and Afrocentric names... Aren't the older generations more conservative? All of the names I input yielded neutral or left leaning results.

[GratefulCitizen]

I don't buy it.
New angle on the old "push poll".

[VA Pete]

IMO - it belongs on Buzzfeed versus the Post.

Here’s an Earth shattering surprise – the creators of the poll are 100% Dem and former BHO campaign analyst. Wow, I'm shocked!:rolleyes:

http://www.claritycampaigns.com/team/#our-team

This is not a poll. This is a combination of voter registration data, as mentioned above, joined to a wide variety of commercially available sources, plus predictive math models. It's very accurate.

The nature of the data is that each side has their own version of it; this just happens to be the left's. The RNC started http://parabellumlabs.com/index.html to get serious about their side of it (this was national news within the last few weeks).