A friend mentioned to me that some radio host (Laura Ingraham, I think) was complaining that “the Democrats stole the color blue for their states”. Which is just silly…but, oddly enough, I recall having seen some explanation (in one of the political threads a couple months ago) as to why the colors red and blue were chosen. Something to do with standard statistical conventions that dealt with how to represent values/numbers in graphical format. The post also mentioned that the red/blue should be reversed this year, but that the media latched onto “red=Republican” and “blue=Democrat” and that was the way it was going to stay.
Does anyone else remember seeing this? More to the point, can anyone cite reasons for the choice of red and blue significations?
I don’t think it’s the media’s fault. Most tv networks switch which colors they use for the parties each election. But someone (probably a Republican) started talking about red and blue states after the last election and that became an idiom which seems to have fixed the colors. At least for now.
Thanks for the effort! I don’t remember the red/blue thing being a big deal when I was growing up (from Carter onward), at least not before the last election. If I had to wager a guess, it would just be - it seems that most everything concerned with campaigns in this country is “red, white, and blue” in an attempt to imply patriotism, so red and blue were the natural choice.
I believe that the designations “Red America” and “Blue America” were coined by David Brooks in his article “One Nation, Slightly Divisible: A Report from ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ America,” which appeared in the December 2001 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Brooks described the networks’ electoral maps from Election Night 2000 as the basis for his designations. One recent review describes it as “the article that spawned a million Red America vs. Blue America clichés.”
For a long time, www.electoral-vote.com used red for the Democrats, blue for the Republicans. The site owner’s rationale, IIRC, was that blue was historically the colour used for the incumbent and red for the challenger. However, he has since switched to the more widely accepted (if historically inaccurate) color scheme of red for GOP, blue for Dems.
An interesting article, particularly this comment:
The designation of Democrats as blue and Republicans as red has struck me as counterintuitive. A critic from the right might feel, as the “lot of Republicans” from this quote evidently did, that the Democrats were the party of socialism – what right-wingers during the Cold War would have called “pinkos,” thus more closely associated with the color red. And a critic from the left might feel that the Republicans were the party of the moneyed class, the blue-blooded aristocracy, thus more closely associated with the color blue.
Keep in mind that the use of colored election maps has grown exponentially over the past 15 years. Before that, you’d see a colored map occasionally in a magazine article, and on the three TV networks on Election Night. That was all. Newspapers almost always printed in black and white, there was no Web and no cable TV to speak of, and most of all, no non-stop 50-state polling that cried out for graphical representation. So, there was less need for a coloration standard.
My own subjective impression, based on hazy memories of past Election Nights, is that the majority of TV networks always tended to use red for Republicans and blue for Democrats, possibly because Red and Republican both start with “r” which makes it easier to remember. But, this was by no means uniform. I don’t remember any blue=incumbent custom, although it’s possible I never broke the code. But that custom would have been problematic for Congressional races where the incumbents are of different parties in each contest.
Now, with the explosion in polling and colorized media, we need a standard, and Barone’s text seems to have set it in concrete. Good for him, I say.
It’s a good thing I’m not in charge of coloring the maps. This sort of thing would prompt me to color them green and yellow instead, just to spite everybody. Then, we’d have a fresh bunch of speculation like “the liberal media is saying the Republicans are cowardly”, and probably someone would be looking for conspiracies involving the Green Bay Packers.
It may be then the media decided to use red for the Republicans because it could be associated with communism or being a “pinko” if used for the Dems. The Dems might see that as offensive. Since nobody would associate Pubs with commies, it was safe to use red for them. And if blue is associated with the filthy rich blue-blooded aristocrats, THAT is an image the Pubs don’t want to be associated with them. The Pubs know they need the votes of Joe Six-pack.
In 1976 all the networks used red for the Democrats and blue for the Republicans. For some reason, I remember that election very well. Maybe it was because I was taking a political science class in high school that year.
