Scott Alexander found a couple online lists of “biggest douchebag names” and ran them against Clarity Campaigns‘ database of names and political affiliations — and found that Republicans are douchebags:
I can think of
twothree hypotheses.First, douchebags are disproportionately Republican.
Second, the parents who name kids douchebag names are disproportionately Republican, and Republicanism is partly hereditary (I almost missed this one, but JayMan reads this blog and I know he would call me on it if I forgot).
Third, “douchebag” is a tribally-coded slur. If someone asks “Have you ever noticed that all assholes are named things like ‘Moishe’ or ‘Avram’ or ‘Menachem’?” – then they’re telling you a lot more about the way they use the word ‘asshole’ than about the Moishes and Menachems of the world.
Or as the first commentator Anthony said:
I saw that. I think there is some serious skewing going on with that measure of ‘Republicanness.’ (i.e. X% of names are more democratic than that name.)
I think basically there’s a whole lot of ‘very democratic names’ that are relatively unique. I’ll bet if you made a histogram of all the names, with most common on the left out to least common on the right, there would be a very long, mostly blue tail out to the right. So, all you’ve got to do is have a pretty common name, and it’s going to appear that a fairly large % of names are ‘more democratic’ than yours, just because a whole lot of democrats out there have very rare names (I’m sure you can think of some…) and ‘Bob’ counts just as much as a category as, say, ‘Latoya.’
Just try putting in a few names in that website, and the skew is obvious. ‘Raymond’ is (a slim) majority democrat name, but ~60% of names are still somehow ‘more democratic’ than Raymond. If that’s the case, how much does Scott Alexander’s statistic even mean? It seems to me to say more about uniqueness of name choice among democrats than anything about republicans, except maybe conventionality of name choice.
Laughing to find my name douchebagesque and way, way, way on the Republican end of the political map, sandwiched between Duane and Troy. What a journey into self-knowledge this site is!