As First Lady, Popularity of Babies Named “Hillary” Dropped by an Unprecedented 90%

By Francis Smart

This is kind of a silly post but I noticed an article entitled “Poor, Poor Hillary” on R-Bloggers from a blog that is no longer in commission. This blog came up as a result of its similarity with a recent post of mine, “Hillary Clinton’s Biggest 2016 Rival: Herself” in which I examine the quality of the press coverage of Hillary over the last year and how it has revolved around never ending scandals.

In the “Poor, Poor Hillary” article, the author makes note that the popularity of naming babies Hillary fell dramatically during her tenure as First Lady. I found this an interesting idea and decided to expand upon it to see if a fall in popularity was typical of First Ladies. Looking back at the last eight I found that all of them were associated with a drop in popularity of the first name.

Table 1: Drop in popularity of first name as a ratio of frequency at end of term divided by frequency the year before beginning of term.

From Table 1, we can see that the name “Hillary” dropped the most in popularity over her term as First Lady by a whopping 90%, followed by Laura (Bush) 62%, and distantly Michelle (Obama) 48%. Nancy retained the most popularity by only falling by 16% while First Lady.