Nobody Wanted to Name Their Kids Donald, Hillary or Bernie This Year

It’s been almost a full year since President Trump’s inauguration, if you can believe that. But even though a Donald is in the White House, it looks like there won’t be many parents inspired to name their kids after him during his time in office.

The Social Security Administration won’t release its official yearly numbers for a few months still, but judging by the traffic on baby-name websites, 2017 wasn’t a great year for the baby name Donald, and it was even worse for the name Hillary. But you might start noticing a lot more babies named Melania soon.

The baby-name site Nameberry notes that overall, the pageviews for the name Donald have increased more than tenfold since 2011. Peak months for the name Donald were in November 2016, around the election, and January 2017, around the inauguration. But the traffic for Donald has been dropping since then, and the name got the same amount of pageviews in November as it did in January 2015.

That drop reflects the federal data, too. According to Time, the Social Security Administration’s numbers showed only 621 babies were named Donald in 2016, making the name the least popular it has been in a century. In case you were wondering, the name peaked in popularity in the 1930s.

“I seriously don’t know who would name their baby Donald anymore, including Trump fans,” says Pamela Redmond Satran, co-creator of Nameberry. “As a name, it’s as out as, say, Shirley. My guess is that it survives mostly as a family name, with baby Donald named for dad and/or grandpa Donald.”

Another parenting website, BabyCenter, tells ELLE.com that Donald has gone down 9 percent in popularity this year, and that was after rising by 8 percent in 2016. But that’s not the case for most of his family this year. On their site, Barron is up 7 percent, Eric is up 9 percent, Don (a nickname for Donald Jr.) is up 37 percent, Ivanka is up 2 percent, and Jared (as in Jared Kushner) is up 17 percent, though Tiffany is down 4 percent. But the big winner in the Trump family is Melania, whose name has gone up 51 percent in popularity on BabyCenter this year.

Things aren’t looking up on the Democratic side, though. In 2016, the name Hillary spiked 142 percent on BabyCenter, but it has gone down by 151 percent in 2017. Bernie declined by 96 percent this year, and Bernard went down 56 percent, and those numbers didn’t see a spike in 2016, either.

The case has been a little different with President Obama, whose name is far rarer than Donald or Hillary. According to The Huffington Post, Barack didn’t even register on the Social Security database until 2007, when there were five babies born named Barack. The name peaked in 2009, his first full year in office, when 69 babies named Barack and 19 babies named Obama were born.

The popularity of his name declined throughout his time in office, though it might be creeping up again in the Trump years, and the names of his daughters have also followed a similar pattern of popularity. In 2016, 19 babies named Barack were born, 1,227 babies named Malia were born, and 581 babies were named Sasha. Michelle bests the rest of her family, with 1,559 babies born with her name in 2016.

Source : Elle