What's in a Name? Ideology

Is your first name liberal or conservative?

Okay, lemme admit that normally I ignore sponsored tweets via Twitter, but this one hit me where I live -- data, and politics. You can go here and type in your first name to find out where you are, on the ideological spectrum, at least as decided by your first name.

My name, Barry, is middle-to-conservative.

So how do they do it?

Crowdpac calculates this score based on the average of all campaign contributions made by people with this name since 1980. 10L is the most liberal; 10C is the most conservative.

Hence the "crowd" in Crowdpac. Essentially folks named "Barry" have tended to give to candidates located ideologically in the middle and slightly more to the right. Okay, but how do they decide whether the money went to a leftie or rightie candidate? Not sure, but the site has a data blog that looks promising.