Apparently my parents knew what they were doing

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This website asks:

HOW DEMOCRATIC IS YOUR NAME?

There’s a lot that goes into every model we build, and a person’s first name is one small portion of that. See what your name says about you.

So I typed my first name in, and this is what came back:

Clarity Campaign screen shot

Clarity Campaign screen shot 2

I can’t remember which version of my first name is my registered-voter name, but in either case you’ll note there are more red-voting Steves than blue-voting Steves. I’m not a Republican, but readers can guess how I usually vote.

Most of us, it seems, attend church weekly and have a college degree. I fit in the minority on the gun-ownership question.

There is probably less to this than appears to be the case, as the person who posted this on Facebook pointed out:

Name is a great predictor of turnout when you don’t know anything else about someone. This is because certain names were popular at certain times, so they’re pretty good at guesstimating your age, which is highly correlated with turnout and somewhat correlated with partisanship.

That’s interesting, because my first name reached its height of popularity, according to the Social Security Administration, in the decade before I was born — specifically, 1951 in the U.S. and 1952 in Wisconsin. My first name didn’t even reach the top 100 in Wisconsin in 2012.

One response to “Apparently my parents knew what they were doing”

  1. Fay Prestegard Avatar
    Fay Prestegard

    Interesting stats!

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