After Brandon posted a map of places in one state named after other states, I was curious which states are the most popular. I had some guesses: lots of Washington because of the president, older and bigger states more heavily represented, but I wasn't very confident in any of it. So I downloaded the list of domestic names from the USGS to find out. [1]

179	Washington
42	Virginia
41	Texas
28	California
22	Delaware
21	Wyoming
20	Oregon
19	Kansas
16	Georgia
15	Oklahoma
15	Michigan
14	Montana
14	Maryland
13	Nebraska
12	Nevada
11	Minnesota
11	Florida
11	Colorado
11	Alabama
10	Ohio
10	New York
9	Maine
9	Iowa
7	Vermont
7	Connecticut
6	Missouri
6	Kentucky
6	Illinois
6	Idaho
6	Arkansas
6	Alaska
5	Tennessee
4	Utah
3	Rhode Island
3	New Hampshire
3	Arizona
2	West Virginia
2	Pennsylvania
2	Indiana
1	Wisconsin
1	New Mexico
1	Louisiana

No matches for: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota. The Dakotas and Carolinas make sense: if you consider them without "North" or "South" you get 9 for "Dakota" and 16 for "Carolina". You could think "New Jersey" is just suffering because it has "New," but "New York" did fine. Still, I can see why people don't want to name their town "New Jersey," and "Massachusetts" and "Mississippi" are kind of awkwardly long, but why not "Hawaii"? That's a nice place, and "Alaska," equally recent, has six towns including two in PA.

If people aren't naming their towns "Massachusetts" are they at least honoring our excellent state in naming their children? The Social Security Administration provides names for people born since 1880, where at least five people were given that name and gender that year. Doing the same calculation we get:

Virginia	648,005
Georgia	146,132
Montana	9,879
Florida	3,532
Nevada	3,431
Washington	2,518
Arizona	2,273
Indiana	1,553
Missouri	1,541
Maryland	1,288
Kansas	1,017
Tennessee	806
Texas	544
Alaska	400
Utah	341
Louisiana	278
Alabama	194
California	150
Iowa	79
Nebraska	75
Colorado	59
Vermont	28
Illinois	16
Wyoming	11
Maine	9
Oklahoma	5
Michigan	5
Hawaii	5

Because first names can't have spaces, the ten states with two-word names aren't included. But again if we break out "Dakota" and "Carolina" we get 108,013 and 39,348 respectively, so they would be up there.

How well do these two measures of popularity correlate?

Not very well. Except everyone agrees not to name things "Massachusetts".

[1] Following Brandon, I filtered out anything containing "trailer," "historical," or "mobile home". Unlike Brandon I required whole-word matches, so Bidahochi AZ would not be counted towards Idaho.