This much is obvious: It makes perfect sense for news organizations covering a Presidential election to use a color-coded map of the U.S. to keep track of electoral votes by state.
So who decided on Red for Democrat and Blue for Republican? Any symbolic reason for the choices? How long has this code been the standard?
It wasn’t until after the 2000 election that I started becoming aware of people routinely using the terms “Red State” and “Blue State” to refer to predominantly liberal or conservative regions. Before that I never really noticed which colors were used for which, or cared, or remembered the day after the election.
As the link indicated, for the 1976 election the colors were red for Democrats, blue for Republicans (at least on NBC.) I remembered that. I must be the only one in the country who thought that was natural, so felt a bit disoriented when the meanings of the colors were reversed.
Heh. I remember editing the wikipedia article when it was first created, way back in the 2000 election. I noted that, years before, Dan Rather would remind us, that the darker color was one candidate, the lighter one was another one, for those of us with black and white television, which I was using in those earlier days.
So I bought up, the red, blue, white, grey colors were likely meant to help people have a visual impression of the election’s status. It is something of a mystery to people from other countries, red being the traditional color for the local Communist party, why that color was chosen for the US. It’s all just a visual.
As I recall, it used to be switched from year to year, red/blue - Dem/Rep, then flipped to avoid any sort of bias I guess. Then it got locked after 2000.
I really liked when the wikipedia article updated to the purple states, it really brought home to me how the whole concept of red-state/blue state was fabricated anyway. It used to be just a visual aid.
The political parties in Canada have had colour associations for decades, only backward. Red for Liberal, Blue for Conservative, and Orange for the socialist party of the nation, the NDP. Green has been the colour for several other parties from time to time.
In a parliamentary system, each area (riding) elects only a local MP and the majority of MP’s detemines the government. It makes sense to colour-code the so people get to know who in their area to vote for.
In the USA, each presidential campaign is separate and unique, so I’m not sure how important the colours are except on the CNN magic wall.