 "A girls colours an electoral map of the United States in either red or blue ahead of the US general election in Raleigh, North Carolina, US. The 2024 US presidential election will take place on Tuesday, November 5. File Image/Reuters")
The 2024 US presidential election is just days away. And the big question is whether numerous contested states will turn red or blue. But how did this practice of describing Republican states and the party’s supporters as red and Democrat states and its supporters as blue, start?
The colour association of red for Republicans and blue for Democrats became widely recognised in the 2000 US presidential election, but the tradition wasn’t always this way.
Originally, colours used in election maps varied widely, with no consistent scheme across networks. Sometimes blue represented the incumbent party, sometimes the challenging party, and it even switched between elections.
The 2000 election, however, was highly polarised and closely contested between George W Bush and Al Gore, which led media networks to develop colour-coded maps that were used in nearly continuous coverage.
Different networks chose different colour assignments, but many eventually gravitated towards red for Republican and blue for Democratic as the race dragged on due to the recount dispute in Florida. The prolonged media focus on a single set of colour associations cemented the scheme in the public’s mind.
The choice wasn’t based on historical or ideological reasons; it was more a product of convention and consistency. The association stuck, and the terms “red states” and “blue states” became part of the national lexicon to describe Republican-leaning and Democratic-leaning states.
Eventually, red and blue colours became so culturally significant that they influenced merchandise, logos, and campaign materials, reinforcing the association.
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Interestingly, this colour association is somewhat unique to the United States. In many other countries, red is often associated with left-wing or progressive parties, reflecting socialism or workers’ movements, while blue is more commonly linked with conservative factions.
The US divergence in colour coding speaks more to the power of media influence than any historical alignment.
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With inputs from agencies