In a name, in a name, in a name

So, of all the goofy things lately, I have been spent time on the TargetSmart Communications widget looking up partisan identification by last name. My own last name is reasonably common, with fourteen thousand or so party-identified folk, and unsurprisingly (to me) more than ten thousand are in My Party. That’s 72%, which is pretty good. My Best Reader, on the other hand, has fewer than four hundred fellows-of-the-surname, slightly more than half of whom are in the Other Party. Mildly amusing.

I wanted to know if that 72% was a serious outlier or just the natural result of a "Jewish" name. Let’s try Cohen—75%. Levy—74%. Goldberg—75%. Rubenstein—75%. Silberman—74%. Rosenzweig—74%. Hm. Now mine is looking a bit… bipartisan. Let’s try… O’Malley—57%. Oh, dear. Mahoney—57%. Connolly—57%. Shea—58%. Hmmm, hmm, hm. Cortez—80%. Rodriguez—80%. Martinez—81%. Perez—79% (but Peres only 63%).

OK, so here’s some trivia questions for y’all: Think of the Presidents in chronological order. The early Presidents’ surname-sharers are going to be overwhelmingly of My Party for reasons I hope will be obvious: Washington is 95%, and Jefferson is 89%, f’r’ex. So, without punching in the names into the widget, can you guess which is the (chronologically) first President whose current surname yields a majority from the Other Party? When do we first get two Presidents in a row over 50% red? Whose surname is the most likely to be in the Other Party? And who is the (chronologically) first President whose name is currently shared by fewer than a hundred registered voters, and thus does not yield an answer in the database at all?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.