Before the 2000 presidential election, there was no universally recognized color scheme to represent the political parties in the United States. In fact, the color scheme was often reversed, in line with historical European associations ( red was used for left-leaning parties). [2] [3] The parties themselves had no official colors, with candidates variously using either or both of the national color palette of red and blue (white being unsuitable for printed materials).
There is some historical use of blue for Democrats and red for Republicans: in the late 19th century and early 20th century, Texas county election boards used color coding to help Spanish speakers and illiterates identify the parties; [4] however, this system was not applied consistently in Texas and was not picked up on a national level. For instance, in the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison used maps that coded blue for the Republicans, the color Cleveland perceived to represent the Union and " Lincoln's Party", and red for the Democrats. [5]
The practice of using colors to represent parties dates back at least as far as 1908, a year during which at least two newspapers depicted electoral maps in color. That year, The New York Times printed a special color map, using blue for Democrats and yellow for Republicans, to detail Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 electoral victory. [6] That same year, a color supplement included with a July issue of the Washington Post used red for Republican-leaning states, blue for Democratic-leaning states, yellow for "doubtful" states, and green for territories, which had no presidential vote. [7]
The advent of color television prompted television news reporters to rely on color-coded electoral maps, though sources conflict as to the conventions they followed. According to one source, from 1976 to 2004, the broadcast networks, in an attempt to avoid favoritism in color coding, standardized on the convention of alternating every four years between blue and red the color used for the incumbent party. [7] [8] According to another source, in 1976, John Chancellor, the anchorman for NBC Nightly News, asked his network's engineers to construct a large illuminated map of the USA. The map was placed in the network's election-night news studio. If Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate that year, won a state, it would light up in red; if Gerald Ford, the Republican, carried a state, it would light up in blue. The feature proved to be so popular that four years later all three major television networks would use colors to designate the states won by the presidential candidates on Election Night, though not all using the same color scheme. NBC continued to use the color scheme employed in 1976 for several years. NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the 1980 election map outcome as showing Ronald Reagan's 44-state landslide as resembling a "suburban swimming pool". [9] CBS, from 1984 on, used the opposite scheme: blue for Democrats, red for Republicans. ABC used yellow for one major party and blue for the other in 1976. However, in 1980 and 1984, ABC used red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. In 1980, when independent John B. Anderson ran a relatively high-profile campaign as an independent candidate, at least one network provisionally indicated that they would use yellow if he were to win a state.
By 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while TIME and The Washington Post used an opposite scheme. [10] [11] [12]
In the days following the 2000 election, whose outcome was unclear for some time after election day, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view, and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On Election Night that year, there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association had gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms "red states" and "blue states" entered popular usage in the weeks following the 2000 presidential election. After the results were final, journalists stuck with the color scheme, as The Atlantic's December 2001 cover story by David Brooks entitled, "One Nation, Slightly Divisible", illustrated. [13] Thus, red and blue became fixed in the media and in many people's minds, despite the fact that no "official" color choices had been made by the parties. [14]
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