Political Parties and Colors (Red/Blue)

Factual Questions
1

I’m watching the news today and, of course, the talk is all politics and predictions. But I have a question…

Is it just me or does anyone else remember when the colors used by the news stations were: Blue = Republican and Red = Democrat?

Today it is the opposite. (And I recall in the famous election of 2000 it was Red = Republican and Blue = Democrat also.)

So…

Does anyone remember the Blue = Republican period?
(I’m thinking Reagan/Bush era. And, I have done the requisite search on Google. Most of what I find are references to the “Blue Dress” and the book “Primary Colors.” I did find one site about a special stained-glass flag that has the colors by party listed as Blue= Republican etc. Here:

http://www.wcnet.org/~erallen/ABSTRACT.html

        White---No political party
        Yellow --- Federalist
        Combination of red and blue---Democrat / Republican
        Burgundy---Whig
        Red---Democrat
        Blue---Republican
        Light blue--- National-Union)

Is there any historical significance to the colors (whichever way they belong)?

Thanks for the input…

2

From what I understand, Blue = Right of center, and Red = Left of center. There are other colors, too…green is obvious. I don’t know about libertarian, but I’m guessing they have a color too.

3

I have wondered about this as well.

IIRC, it was --as Hermn8r says-- into the Reagan years when red = Democrat and blue = Republican, but then the term “Liberal” became a kiss of death to a candidate’s career, so the TV news began reversing the color scheme (IMHO) to get away from the implication that Democrats were “Reds”. I suppose if you pressed the media graphics guys, they’d say that they were looking for some kind of implied alliteration between the “R” in red and Republican, but that’s too thin to believe.

The other colors being associated with other parties as in the OP is news to me, though. The closest I can come to that is white (or maybe also blue or purple) = royalist, red = revolutionary and/or communist, and black = fascist.

4

I never associated any significance to the colors since they seem to switch back & forth from one election to another and, sometimes, between networks as well.