If you want to win federal office, have this…

I was talking to a friend and mentioned that if your last name is near the beginning of the alphabet you are far more likely to be elected to federal office than the opposite. She was incredulous. “Why?” she said.

I pointed out, as I wrote, and wanted to fix if elected two years ago, that political candidates are listed in alphabetical order.

As I do not think that a significant number of voters have any idea who to vote for, or know anything about what a candidate stands for or wants to do, they will just vote for the first one on the list within a party.

That excludes ballots with a listed incumbent, the most predictable choice. Incumbents are notated as Incumbents on ballots so that you’ll vote for them.

You do.

If the ballots didn’t state who the incumbent was, I think that as a large percentage of the voters wouldn’t know who their senators or representative were they would vote for the “wrong candidate.”

That means if your last name begins in the first quadrant of the alphabet you have a better chance that you will be the person elected, especially if your competitors are further down the list and there isn’t an incumbent.

So if your last name begins with a Z the chances are that you will never win an election because you’ll be at the bottom of the list.

In that case don’t bother wasting your time and money.

I am aware of the total name count by letter, but this observation takes that into account.

I did some research using Wikipedia’s list of the 540 incumbent members of Congress (Senate and House) and sorted them by last name.

I then counted how many there were by each of the twenty-six letters, and how frequently that particular letter were elected.

As you can see from the attached graphs it is dominated by the first group of last names and steadily decreases towards the end of the alphabet.

My research did not go deeply by looking at open seats races versus those with incumbents. I suspect that the results are far more skewed to the first part of the alphabet with open seats as there isn’t an “automatic” re-elect the incumbent mentality.

Here’s a graph showing the five letter numerical moving average of the number of incumbent congresspeople, by last name. It’s easier to see the trend –

As I wrote, incumbents are almost always reelected so my numbers are skewed, but I believe broadly speaking accurate.

I will do some additional research and break this out by non-incumbent races versus with incumbents for federal office.

The fix, as I’ve written before, is for the electronic ballot candidate listings to be randomized for every voter. That means that in any federal election, candidate names are in randomized order on each and every ballot, in each and every district.

In that way the system will be fairer and not dependent on what your last name happens to be. Will that happen? If I’m elected in the next cycle, I’ll push for it. If not, not a chance.

Stay tuned