The New York Times has been conducting polls with Siena College for the past two months and decided to look through its data to figure out how people with certain names are voting. It turns out, women named “Karen” support Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden by a 20-point margin.
It’s an utterly meaningless poll, but it does provide a bit of fun before one will certainly be a tumultuous election week.
The name Karen has become a pejorative used to describe the type of person, particularly middle-aged white women, who demand to speak to a manager when things don’t go their way. It’s actually derived from an old Dane Cook joke (perhaps his only real legacy), though it has evolved over time.
Sixty percent of women named Karen and who participated in a Times poll in the past two months said they were voting for Biden, while just 40% indicated they would vote for President Donald Trump.
The Times compiled data from its polls of more than 17,000 likely voters in 18 battleground states. The table it produced contains 102 names, since those were the ones for which the Times had at least 30 respondents.
The results are amusing. For example, men named Donald were the most likely to say they were voting for Trump, with 68% supporting the president and just 19% saying they supported Biden, giving Trump a 48-point margin among men sharing his first name. Men named Joseph, however, were not more likely to support Biden, with men of that name breaking evenly for either candidate at 45%.
Women named Sarah were actually the most likely to support Biden, with 68% saying they would vote for the Democratic candidate and 24% saying they would support the president, a 44-point margin for Biden.
You can easily search the database to see how people with your name said they will vote in Tuesday’s general election.
Current national and battleground polls suggest Biden will easily win on November 3. RealClearPolitics’ polling average shows Biden winning 51% of the vote to Trump’s 44%. Polls in battleground states show a tighter margin, but even their Biden and Democrats have a higher percentage of support than they did in 2016 when they lost.
Of course, nothing truly matters until election day, and as with 2016, the polls can be off (that’s where the margin of error comes in). As The Daily Wire’s John Bickley wrote, battleground polling has likely improved since 2016 but may still be inaccurate.
“While the national polls can be helpful in trying to gauge widespread public sentiment and momentum, the election, of course, isn’t decided by the popular vote — the data that matters most comes from the states. The problem is, as 2016 demonstrated, state polling is often more inaccurate due in part to less thorough information. Trump’s 304–227 electoral defeat of Clinton in 2016, despite heading into election day with a predicted loss of at least 6 votes, was a product of multiple election day reversals in key battleground states: polls showed Trump trailing in Michigan by 3.4, but he won by 1 point; Trump trailed by 6.5 points in Wisconsin, won by 1; Trump trailed by 2 in Pennsylvania, eked out another 1-point win again,” Bickley wrote.