This analysis jumps off an original analysis of the popularity of First Lady baby names. The original analysis showed that, when a president was elected, the popularity of the respective first lady’s name for babies dropped significantly. You can find the original analysis here .
Our analysis aims to move further in this investigation, specifically focusing on Hillary’s name (since she is quite relevant nowadays), while also taking a look to see if the men in this data are affected in the same way as the ladies.

For every graph displayed in this analysis, the popularity (y-axis) has been scaled so that 1 is the peak of popularity of the baby name over the years as First Lady (or the one year prior). Any values above 1 have been scaled to 1% of their original size in our analysis.

The graph below is one of the original graphs from the original article, with some minor changes to the color of the rectangles.

When a president enters office, his wife’s name usually becomes less popular. It is also interesting to point out that a few of the names rise fairly quickly before dropping sharply.

The following graph is similar to the previous one except it now diplays the trends for the president’s names.

The downward trend isn’t as strong as the female names, however the male names seem to be more common than the female names. Barack’s name is also interesting to look at, however his trend is most likely due to his name not being common in the years before his presidency.

The following graph displays Hillary’s trend compared to other female names that peaked around the same year Hillary did.

We chose these names based on the fact that they were in the top 5 most popular around the late 80s and early 90s. You can see that Hillary is drastically different compared to the other “control” names, with a very sharp drop after the peak.

The following table shows the drop proportions of each name both while their husband was in office, and 8 years before their husband was elected. This proportion is the percentage that the name loses in popularity over time.

Drop Proportions of First Lady Names
Eight Office
Thelma 0.52 0.40
Betty 0.63 0.39
Rosalynn -2.40 0.31
Nancy 0.42 0.16
Barbara 0.42 0.37
Hillary -1.50 0.90
Laura 0.55 0.62
Michelle 0.40 0.48

The first column shows how the rate of each name changed over the 8 years before husband’s presidency. The second column shows the drop of the naming rate during presidency.

Rosalynn, Hillary, Laura, and Michelle show a significant drop in naming rate during their husband’s presidency compared to before the presidency. However, Thelma, Betty, Nancy, and Barbara slowed down in the rates that their names dropped during their husband’s presidency. This shows that while naming rates really did drop siginifcantly in some cases after a president was elected, rates seemed unaffected in other cases.