Red State and Blue State Baby Names: an Evolution 🇺🇸
Exclusive analysis for Nameberry Newsletter readers!
Names are huge clues about our identities. Age and gender, ethnicity and religion — there’s a lot of information we can glean about someone (or more accurately, their parents) from just hearing their name.
Including the politics of their home state!
Our big story this week is The Reddest and Bluest Baby Names. We analyzed names given to 500+ babies in 2023 to find those that were chosen predominantly in states that voted Red or Blue in the last presidential election.
The results defy our expectations of liberal and conservative baby names!
But this wasn’t our first rodeo. We first analyzed the Reddest and Bluest names in 2016, when Francesca and Rocco topped the list of Bluest Names, and Blakely and Kason were the Reddest Names.
Despite the polarizing political events of the past eight years, our findings between 2016 and 2024 are similar — Red States favor unconventional, trend-driven names, while Blue States prefer traditional names rooted in history:
We did, however, identify a few key differences:
Of the names that made the Red and Blue Top 25s in 2016, Miriam, Muhammad, and Ali have become even more disproportionately Blue (percentage-wise, not necessarily in terms of rank) over the past eight years, while Hattie, Gracelynn, Marlee, and Paisley have increased in Redness.
The Reddest names of 2016 with then-trendy sounds — such as Addyson, Addilynn, Braylen, and Braxton — fell off the list, as nature-oriented syllables like "oak" and "wren" have gained favor among Red State parents.
America’s Muslim population has grown between 2016 and 2024, and today’s Bluest names include many more Arabic names than eight years ago. These replace many of the distinctly Italian choices — such as Giuliana, Bianca, and Enzo — that were among the Bluest Names of 2016.
Additionally, the Top Blue Names of 2016 included five girl names and eight boy names that have always been in the US Top 1000. In 2024, Blue state parents are moving away from traditional American names towards globally traditional names that are newer to the US charts. Only six of the Bluest Names, fewer than half the 2016 number, have remained in the Top 1000 since 1880: Miriam, Nina, and Rachel for girls, and Francis, Felix, and Frank for boys.
Thanks to Daniel Parris of
for his statistical analysis:
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When I saw this title of red and blue state names I was thinking of blue and red names such as RED: Ruby, Garnet, Coral, Scarlett etc. and BLUE: Sapphire, Navy, Indigo etc.
I don’t know for certain, but I can imagine there’s a substantial overlap between social class and red/blue names. Many of the non-ethnic blue names strike me as distinctly aristocratic, the inverse for red names.