As you know, just about all the news you hear, watch or read is all about politics — even subjects that shouldn’t be, and have never been in the past, are now political. Even when I was young, I was alway kind of fascinated by politics. I remember really enjoying the political conventions — when they weren’t just the formality of nominating a candidate for the presidency. I always considered them entertaining , as well as educational. It never occurred to me that that wouldn’t be the way we always determined our candidates.
I saw a map of the United states the other night and some of the states were colored blue and some were colored red. The news person was explaining what one party needed to do turn a red state blue (or a blue state red.) When I was a kid, the Republican party was represented by an elephant and the Democratic party was represented by a donkey. I don’t remember any “color” being associated with either party.
Well, of course that got me to wondering, and my extensive research mode kicked in.
The first published reference I found to red states or blue states was in the Boston Globe on October 15, 1992 in a column written by David Nyhan. He referred to red states as Democratic and blue states as Republican. That is exactly opposite of what we see today. Further research uncovered that in 1976, NBC identified states won by Gerald Ford in blue and Jimmy Carter’s states in red. And on election night in 1980, ABC News showed Ronald Reagan votes as a series of blue lights on a map — Carter’s votes were shown in red. It turns out that Time magazine assigned red to the Democrats and blue to the Republicans in its election graphics in every election from 1988 to 2000. The Washington Post’s election graphics for the 2000 election were Republican-blue and Democrat-red.
So it looks like prior to 2000 it was more common to associate red with Democrats and blue with Republicans.
In the 2000 election, NBC, CBS, CNN and USA Today all coded their maps blue for Gore and red for Bush. Why was there a color switch from 1996, when Clinton states were colored red? One explanation I found indicated that since the advent of color TV, there was a formula put in place to avoid charges of giving any party an advantage by painting it a “better” color. The formulas is: the color of the incumbent party alternates every 4 years. If you’re really interested, you might want to check this out, but looking back, it seems to make some amount of sense to me.
There appears to have been a lot of confusion over colors for a number of years, but by 1992, news networks seemed to have mostly settled on red-for-Republican, blue-for Democrat. One interesting fact that my extensive research uncovered was that NBC was not the first to broadcast election night in color (many articles I found indicated that that was the case.) The NBC broadcast was in 1976. Actually, it was CBS in 1972 that broadcast the first color election night coverage. I couldn’t find a lot of details, but it appears that Nixon, who won, wore “blue” that night.
Before almost all television stations began broadcasting in color, map colors didn’t matter, since the picture was black-and-white. It may be hard for the “youngsters” to believe, but there was no television at all for the first 40-plus presidential races — people got their news from newspapers, or via the radio.
During the Cold War, red was associated with communism and the Soviet Union — so there was some reluctance to associate that color with either political party.
But back to the color decisions made by the networks every four years — most Americans probably weren’t paying very close attention and likely didn’t associate the colors with the parties as we do now.
What really changed things was the election of 2000. Al Gore won Florida, and then he didn’t, and then George Bush won Florida, and then he didn’t, and for a while we had no idea who the next president would be. The debate over who was finally going to become president went on for a long time and the commentators kept referring to blue states and red states — even comedians got in on the act suggesting that Gore could be president for the blue states and Bush president for the red states. Because this debate/discussion lasted for so long, red designating Republican and blue designating Democrat seems to have sort of “stuck.”
There’s no reason for the choice of red and blue, of course — two other colors could just as easily be used. But blue and red offer good contrast and are good for the television display.
With politics constantly in the news and the fact that it has become so polarized, being able to refer to clusters of votes, or states, it probably makes sense to use a “color” as a kind of shorthand. I suppose that for completeness, I should mention purple. Sometimes states aren’t red or blue — they’re purple. A purple state is a “swing” state — where both Democratic and Republican candidates have strong support, but there is no overwhelming majority for either party.
So I guess that’s about enough about red states and blue states — of course it would be nice if we could just talk about the united states… sigh.
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