I can't believe we share the same genes....my mother! Oy!

The Democratic party in Chicago has elevated this to high art. They can tell you how many votes you can get by having an Irish-sounding name, a Female name or being the first spot on the ballot. It was most famously exploited in the primary of 1986, when bland sounding candidates representing extreme ideals beat out fairly well-known but ethnic sounding candidates George Sangmeister and Aurelia Pucinski- who had thought they were running unopposed.

"At first everyone thought it was a joke. But it wasn't. In the March 18 Illinois primary, two zombified followers of right-wing extremist Lyndon LaRouche actually won the Democratic nominations for secretary of state and lieutenant governor. Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild won on the platform articulated in their cult's New Solidarity newspaper: eliminate Gramm-Rudman, fund Star Wars, test everyone for AIDS (and quarantine victims), and form a "Nuremberg Tribunal" to investigate drug dealing by Zionists and journalists, represented by Henry Kissinger and Katherine Graham, whom the LaRouchies want to hang for treason. Although Hart and Fairchild articulated their sick program to anyone who would listen, most of those who voted for them had no idea what they stood for.

Voters, particularly downstate, voted for the American-sounding names of Fairchild and Hart over the obviously foreign-sounding names of Sangmeister and Pucinski. "[N]o one had heard those foreign-sounding names, and from Chicago and its collar counties to Cairo in Little Egypt, people voted for white bread and American-sounding (i.e., WASP) names, knowing absolutely nothing about the candidates."

THE 1986 LAROUCHE ELECTION DEBACLE IN ILLINOIS