Origin of red and blue states

[dtilque]

previous thread on this, from way back in 2004:

Red/Blue state coloration?

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…