Red and Blue Baby Naming: Inauguration 2009 Edition | Baby Name Wizard

Source: Baby Names Blog: Blog of Baby Name Wizard author Laura Wattenberg | Red and Blue Baby Naming: Inauguration 2009 Edition | Baby Name Wizard

A few years back, I started a project to track down the red-blue divide in name terms. Did blue (liberal) and red (conservative) America actually name their children differently? Yes, they surely did. But how they did was a stunner.  The “bluest” names were traditional, Christian, and single-sex; the “reddest” were newly invented, non-religious and androgynous. …

Let’s say you have two groups of women making fashion choices. One opts for timeless classics, simple and a little formal; the other chooses the newest, trendiest, most eye-catching styles that make old fogeys squirm. What drives the difference? If you had to predict just one variable, the obvious choice is age. Was it possible that blue state parents were more conservative namers simply because they were older?

Sure enough, in 18 of the 19 states that voted for John Kerry in 2004, first-time mothers were older than the national average. And the more Democratic the community, the stronger the effect.