Last updated September 7, 2026

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In 1997, the name Chase was exploding in Washington state - 0.29% of all babies born there, more than five times the New Jersey rate of just 0.06%.

By 2011, the tables had turned completely. Chase was running at 0.33% in New Jersey - now more than double the Washington rate, which had collapsed to 0.15%.

This pattern - Washington first, the nation following, New Jersey last - isn't unique to Chase. Take a look at Joshua, Eloise, Silas, Kennedy, Leon... Washington is a leader, and New Jersey a laggard.

I can hear you grumbling about these being cherry-picked examples. Worry not! We took a deep dive into the data to see if this pattern holds more widely.

Nerd Time

We focused on analyzing peaks: The moment a name hit its peak popularity and began to fall. For each state, we generated a trendsetter score measuring how much a state is ahead of (or behind) the national trend, based on these peaks. Here's what we found:

Washington and Utah are way out in front of the pack, while eastern states like CT, NJ, and DE tend to trail the national trends. Small states tend to be outliers in either direction, but after statistical adjustments for state size, we found that the scores were about the same, so it's not just a "small states have more variability" effect.

Have These Leaders Changed Over Time?

Trendsetters have been pretty stable over time, while laggards have more variability.

What's driving this?

Great question. We have theories — and a prediction model that leans on this pattern heavily. We're building that out into its own view; watch this space.

Caveats & Final Thoughts

These metrics are averages, calculated over hundreds of names, so there are plenty of exceptions to the rule (I'm looking at you, Alberto). A lot of these exceptions are regionally-specific names, a topic we'll dig into in the future.

We tested just how far the averages go. Taking 333 names with a clear national peak, we tried to predict when each of the 51 states peaked by shifting the national peak year by that state's trendsetter score — and across 15,970 state-name pairs it did no better than ignoring the score altogether (a mean error of 4.3 years against 4.2). The pattern itself is not in doubt: a state's score correlates −0.82 with the average lag we actually observe. But an average measured over hundreds of names cannot tell you when one particular name will peak in one particular state, so we don't pretend otherwise anywhere on this page.

Thanks for reading! We've made the trendsetter phenomenon a big part of our top-secret name popularity prediction algorithm... but OH NO WE'VE SAID TOO MUCH ALREADY!