Elliot Lee

I am really young. A random person wanting to buy my domain, webdonkeys.com, said she was planning to use it for something Democrat-related. That led me to read about Democrats and Republicans, their symbols of red and blue, and past elections and so forth. I also read this Wikipedia article on the Red state vs. blue state divide. It was fairly shocking. The 2000 election is the first one I ever paid attention to (I guess I was just the right age when it happened), and for some reason it seemed to me that Republicans have always been traditionally red, and Democrats always traditionally blue. But now that I think about it, I think Wikipedia is right. It should be the opposite!

Prior to the 2000 presidential election, there was no universally recognized color scheme to represent the parties. The practice of using colors to represent parties on electoral maps dates back at least as far as the 1950s, when such a format was employed within the Hammond series of historical atlases. … Early on, the most common– though again, not universal– color scheme was to use red for Democrats and blue for Republicans. This was the color scheme employed by NBC– David Brinkley famously referred to the 1984 map showing Reagan’s 49-state landslide as a “sea of blue”, but this color scheme was also employed by most newsmagazines. CBS during this same period, however, used the opposite scheme … ABC used yellow for one major party and blue for the other. As late as 1996, there was still no universal association of one color with one party.[2]; if anything, the majority of outlets in 1996 were using blue for the GOP and red for the Democrats.

But in 2000, for the first time, all major media outlets used the same colors for each party: Red for Republicans, blue for Democrats. Partly as a result of this first-time universal color-coding, the terms Red States and Blue States entered popular usage in the weeks following the 2000 presidential election. Additionally, the closeness of the disputed election kept the colored maps in the public view for longer than usual, and red and blue thus became fixed in the media and in many people’s minds.[3] Journalists began to routinely refer to “blue states” and “red states” even before the 2000 election was settled, such as The Atlantic’s cover story by David Brooks in the December 2001 issue entitled, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible.” Thus red and blue became fixed in the media and in many people’s minds [4] despite the fact that no “official” color choices had been made by the parties. …

The choice of colors in this divide is counter-intuitive to many international observers, as throughout the world, red is commonly the designated color for parties representing labor and/or leftist interests[6][7], which in the United States would be more closely correlated with the Democratic Party. Similarly, blue is used in these countries to depict conservative parties which in the case of the United States would be a color more suitable for the Republicans. For example, in Canada party colours are deeply ingrained and historic and have been unchanged during the Twentieth Century. The Liberal Party of Canada has long used red and the Conservative Party of Canada has long used blue, and in fact the phrases Liberal red and Tory blue are a part of the national lexicon, as is Red Tory, denoting Conservative members who are social moderates. Similarly, the symbol of Britain’s Labour Party is a red rose (and the socialist song ‘The Red Flag’ is still sung at party conferences), while the British Conservatives are traditionally associated with the colour blue. …