How Republican or Democratic Is Your Name?

With our beer and TV being points of politics these days, you'd think there would be at least one neutral area of our lives, but no: Even our names tend to be more Republican or Democratic, according to the interactive chart above from Yahoo News. 

Columnist Chris Wilson noticed that certain names popped up more for Republicans (Donald, Sharon) and certain ones went to Democrats (Angela, Willie). To figure out of this was actually a thing, Wilson looked at a Federal Election Commission database of names and political party for people who donated at least $200 to a federal campaign. The interactive above tracks donations from 452,000 Obama donators and 315,000 Romney donators. Wilson only used names that showed up at least 25 times and decided if they were individuals by looking at ZIP codes. The closer a dot is to the left, the more people with that name donate to Obama. For instance, 81 percent of people name Ellen donated to Obama, so that dot lands closer to the left. 

As you can see, women names (the pink dots) tend to support Obama while male name (blue dots) tend to go Romney. While more common names tend to go down the middle, some names within genders skew toward one party, like Brent or Clayton for Republicans. You can also choose to arrange the dots by how much money donated. All the dots shift right at that point, suggesting that individual donors tend to give higher amounts of money to Romney. 

You should definitely also enter your own name into the bottom left hand corner to see where it falls. After all, every single part of you now represents an aspect of your politics, so you might as well figure out which way your name leans. 

See Yahoo News for more analysis.