Sorry, this triggered my fact-checkitis. I opened Wikipedia's list of presidents of the US and ran this in the web developer console:
Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(
'#mwgA tr > :nth-child(3) span[data-sort-value]'
))
.map(x => x.getAttribute('data-sort-value')[0])
.reduce(({total, firstHalf}, c) => ({
total: total+1,
firstHalf: c < 'N' ? firstHalf+1 : firstHalf
}), {total: 0, firstHalf: 0});
and it responded Object { total: 47, firstHalf: 31 }
Then I used Agresti and Coull's method for a 95 % confidence interval around this (add two successes and two failures, compute Wald interval as usual). That gives us 65 % ± 13 %
In other words, the 95 % confidence interval of the proportion lies in the span from 52 % to 78 %. That is significantly different from the null hypothesis.I didn't expect it, but we might actually have reason to believe US presidents more often than not do have names starting with letters from the first half of the alphabet.
Edit: But I just realised English letter frequencies have 54 % of the probability mass in the first half of the alphabet, so that's probably a better null hypothesis than the even split. It's also compatible with the actual presidential statistics.