I swear half the voters are just voting for a name that's famous in real life.
Are you sure? There's a pretty vocal libertarian-leaning cohort in this series (myself, shua, Deus, Spiral, Max etc) which roughly squares up with Cleveland's vote total, give or take. For the record, I voted Whig: Merger this time.
I do agree that the famous names tend to do better than ones that are less prominent IRL (much to my disappointment) but I don't think it's solely attributable to that.
I voted Cleveland as, lets face it, the other options are crap.