The Origins of Red and Blue States

Red for Republicans and blue for Democrats is so ingrained that “red states” and “blue states” are standard political shorthand. But the color scheme is younger than most voters. It didn’t settle into place until the 2000 election.

Before 2000, the colors weren’t fixed

One of the earliest color-coded election maps, in Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States (1883), shaded Republican counties blue and Democratic counties red, the reverse of today.

When television networks began using color electoral maps, each chose its own scheme. In 1976, NBC’s giant illuminated map showed Jimmy Carter’s states in red and Gerald Ford’s in blue. NBC kept those colors in 1980, when David Brinkley said Ronald Reagan’s landslide made the map look like “a suburban swimming pool.” ABC used the opposite colors that year, with orange on hand for independent John Anderson. By 1984, ABC and CBS were using red for Republicans, while NBC stuck with blue for Republicans through 1988.

Newspapers and magazines were just as inconsistent. For most of the 20th century there was simply no convention.

2000: The colors lock in

In 2000, the networks used red for George W. Bush and blue for Al Gore. The New York Times and USA Today published their first color election maps that year with the same scheme; a Times graphics editor later explained that “Republican” and “red” both start with R, so the pairing felt natural.

NBC’s Tim Russert is widely credited with popularizing the terms. The week before the election, he used a color-coded map on the Today show to discuss how Bush might win the remaining “red states.” Russert never claimed to have coined the phrase, but William Safire called him its leading popularizer.

Then came the 36-day Florida recount. Night after night, the networks showed the same map with Florida hanging in the balance. The Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore on Dec. 12 ended the recount, and Gore conceded the next day. By then, red for Republicans and blue for Democrats had stuck. By the 2004 campaign, “red state” and “blue state” were part of the political vocabulary.

Why red and blue?

There’s no single explanation. Many other democracies use the opposite scheme: in Britain, Canada and Australia, center-left parties are red and conservative parties blue, reflecting red’s long association with labor and socialist movements. That tradition is why NBC originally used blue for Republicans.

In the U.S., practical considerations won out. Once most outlets settled on red for Republicans in 2000, the rest followed to avoid confusing viewers, and the alliteration of “red” and “Republican” made the pairing easy to remember.

Criticism

The labels have critics. In his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator running for the U.S. Senate, rejected the pundits’ habit of dividing the country into red states and blue states, arguing that Americans share more than the map suggests.

That same year, Republican data analyst Clark Bensen complained in a paper titled “Red State Blues: Did I Miss That Memo?” that the media had discarded the older convention, and argued that party names were clearer than colors anyway.

Others object that the labels flatten a more complicated picture. Most red states have millions of Democratic voters and most blue states millions of Republicans, which is why some maps shade states or counties in purple.

Campaign logos stay blue

Whatever the map says, candidates in both parties favor blue in their branding. Blue, usually paired with red and white, has dominated presidential campaign logos for decades. A 2018 review by the Center for American Politics and Design found that most congressional candidates in both parties made blue their primary logo color.