Guess the state by its popular names

I’m messing around with some Social Security baby name data, preparing examples for the upcoming Humanities Hackathon at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, where I’ll be teaching a one-day course on networks and graphs.

So here’s a quiz.  I give a list of baby names which were strongly overrepresented among babies born in state X in 2011.  You name the state.

1. [‘Jamison’, ‘Keagan’, ‘Nolan’, ‘Cullen’, ‘Finley’, ‘Dane’, ‘Bennett’, ‘Clay’, ‘Clayton’, ‘Sullivan’]
2. [‘Santiago’, ‘Roberto’, ‘Iker’, ‘Alberto’, ‘Joe’, ‘Jose’, ‘Arturo’, ‘Gael’, ‘Armando’, ‘Raul’, ‘Gustavo’, ‘Juan’, ‘Mauricio’, ‘Julio’]
3. [‘Francis’, ‘Nasir’, ‘Semaj’, ‘Shane’]
4. [‘Ivan’, ‘Ismael’, ‘Edgar’, ‘Uriel’, ‘Francisco’, ‘Ramon’, ‘Damian’, ‘Gerardo’, ‘Emiliano’, ‘Sergio’, ‘Fernando’, ‘Esteban’, ‘Joaquin’, ‘Ernesto’, ‘Cesar’, ‘Moises’, ‘Diego’, ‘Ruben’, ‘Maximiliano’, ‘Johnny’]
5. [‘Brendan’, ‘Conor’, ‘Seamus’, ‘Ronan’, ‘Theodore’, ‘Jadiel’, ‘Jacoby’]
6. [‘Lawson’, ‘Khalil’, ‘Jamari’, ‘Chandler’, ‘Brantley’, ‘Cason’, ‘Davis’, ‘Braylen’, ‘Mekhi’]
7. [‘Trenton’, ‘Remington’, ‘Kale’, ‘Dayton’, ‘Blaine’, ‘Clark’, ‘Karter’, ‘Jase’, ‘Lane’, ‘Gunner’]
8. [‘Alonzo’, ‘Zaiden’, ‘Ezekiel’, ‘Trace’, ‘Orion’, ‘Cruz’, ‘Asher’, ‘Milo’, ‘Brodie’, ‘Jonas’, ‘Finley’, ‘Soren’, ‘Archer’, ‘Kellan’, ‘Ryker’, ‘Dillon’, ‘Zane’, ‘Kade’, ‘Nash’, ‘Kian’, ‘Cyrus’, ‘River’, ‘Uriah’, ‘Porter’]
9. [‘Muhammad’, ‘Ali’, ‘Ahmed’, ‘Mohamed’, ‘Moshe’, ‘Aron’, ‘Solomon’, ‘Mohammed’, ‘Justin’, ‘Alvin’, ‘Mohammad’, ‘Wilson’, ‘Abraham’, ‘Ibrahim’]

Hint:  most of these are pretty big states, and one of them is Wisconsin.

Hint 2:  Knowing about football will help you with one of these and knowing about baseball with another.

I think these are pretty hard.

Answers below the fold:

1. Wisconsin.  “Dane” is a county here, and “Clay” is huge thanks to Packers star Clay Mathews.
2. Texas.  One of two big states very rich in Spanish names.  “Iker” is a surprise; it’s a Basque name, and Wikipedia tells me there are many more Basques in California than in Texas.
3. Pennsylvania.  “Semaj” is “James” spelled backwards, but why this is a differentially likely neonym in Penna. is a mystery to me.
4. California.  The other big state with a strong Spanish name presence.  The relative strength of “Cesar” probably recalls Cesar Chavez, and “Diego” and “Joaquin” are attached to CA place names.
5. Massachusetts.  Irish people and Jacoby Ellsbury.
6. Georgia.  The names suggest a large black population, and “Brantley” and “Chandler” have an Old South feel.
7. Missouri.  Note “Remington” and “Gunner.”  “Colt” is popular in MO, too, though not enough to make this list.  People in Missouri like naming kids after guns.
8. Colorado.  This just seems totally right to me, though I would have had a hard time guessing it.
9. New York.  “Moshe.”