It seemed to do so all of a sudden. I’m sure I could find the answer, but someone here probably already knows.
Apparently, 2000 was the year it became truly solidified.
2000, according to wikipedia:
And as those articles say, it wasn’t that “red was Democrat and blue was Republican” prior to 2000 – there was no universally accepted color code for the political alignment of states and different media would use different color schemes to represent election results.
The TV networks had color-coded maps when they were covering the election returns. After the election was called on Tuesday night, they put the maps away for four years and no one gave it a second thought. As I remember it, they used to switch every election cycle. In 1996, 1988, 1980, etc., Democrats were red and Republicans were blue.
In 2000 the election was extremely close, and remained undecided for weeks. That meant weeks of news coverage talking about electoral votes, red states, and blue states. That cemented the terms, and we’ve stuck with the same colors ever since.
It’s kinda weird to see a meme (as in a cultural datum, not as in an amusing internet joke) appear within your adult lifetime and become so universal that it seems to be something that has Always Been.
Sorta how like when I found out that the high-five only originated around 1980.
The word ‘meme’ was coined in 1976.
For reference, here is a web page showing electoral maps with the colors reversed. Some even show elections after 2000. Democrats are red and Republicans are blue in most of them.
One example with a key showing the reversal:
As for why they are reversed:
For a more visual look, here are maps showing the counties won by the parties in each of those elections. Note that the 2016 map, from the Washington Post , uses the now-traditional Democratic blue-Republican red color scheme.
The rest of the maps, from Leip’s website, use blue coloring for Republican counties and red coloring for Democratic counties. (For the record, Leip started using his coloring code in 1994, before the current version became standard; he says that changing every map on his site would require an enormous time commitment.)
That just reinforces the idea that the definition of “red/blue states” is a relatively recent one.
Not sure how set in stone “TV colors” are— if you look at posters, flags, websites, and so on, the actual color scheme for all major parties is red, white, and blue— but it is true that e.g. ActBlue was organized in the early 2000s so there was evidently some momentum to it around then that still persists.
You probably encountered it in a certain infamous book in 1976, but it’s just an Ancient Greek word and Aristotle himself was discussing such things (cultural, not the internet) in the context of different types of poetry (that is where I first ran into it, at least).
And of course it’s still the opposite in Canada – the Liberal Party has adopted red, and the Conservative Party blue. Much as in the US, party leaders often show up at major events wearing ties of their party’s colour. The third major party, the socialist NDP, distinguish themselves from the other two by using orange. It’s attention-getting on signs but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone wearing an orange tie!
I wonder how much this is related to technology…i.e. the internet.
The year 2000 was the first election when the net was universal.
It’s hard to imagine now, but once upon a time, there was no internet. Windows 95 was a revolutionary step in the evolution of the human race, because it was sold with the web browser built in, and for the first time, every home computer was online. (Before that, you had to buy a CD with Netscape Navigator, and figure out how to install it using a telephone modem that made funny wurring sounds.)
And Windows 95 , despite the name, was not sold in 1995–it hit the stores in 1996. But the internet was still new and unfamiliar, slow and primitive. (Remember? Usenet forums, Yahoo Geocities where you could make your own “home page” , the main search engines were Hotbot and Lycos, Google didn’t exist.)
So the election results of 1996 were still reported using the old-fashioned, pre-internet, mindset–and graphics.
I think you are right…each TV network acted independently. But by the election of 2000, I think being online was as common as having cable TV. The internet and Google had become part of our lives.
And computer technology affects our psychology…we sort of expect things to be online, to be instantly available, and easily recognizable.
In 2000, I think most people still had something similar to an adult’s attention span (which we have lost now!)–but still, we were only willing to spend a few seconds sizing up a website’s home page, or deciding whether an image was interesting… So whichever red/blue color system happened to be in use got branded into our minds as the “right” one.
It gave us instant recognition, instant comprehension, no thinking necessary… appropriate for our now internet-style brains and shorter attention spans…
It’s been the other way around. Before 2000, you didn’t need a long attention span for elections. I grew up in the Northwest, and I remember presidential elections where the winner was declared before our polls closed. It was over before our votes were even counted. On the east coast you could find out who won and still make your regular bedtime.
Tory (Conservative) blue and Grit (Liberal) red go back a long way. In the 19th century, conservative and Conservative Catholic priests would warn parishioners that “Le ciel est bleu, l’enfer est rouge”: heaven is blue, hell is red.
Back when the NDP colours were brown and orange, an old CBC Radio sketch, from I think The Royal Canadian Air Farce, suggested “the brown symbolizes our roots in the Prairies and the farmer’s deep connection to the soil. The orange we got on sale.”
The current federal NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh, often wears an orange turban.
When I was growing up, “red” was basically the Communist color, and “blue” was the freedom color. Translate that into Democrat and Republican, for the U.S.
And of course in Canada the greens are…
In Canada today, the colours are reversed. Liberals (Dems) are red while Conservatives (Republicans) are blue. We also have the NDP – orange, and the aforementioned Green Party, as well as a few other assorted choices.
ETA looks like this point has already been made.