Red/blue question...

[ForeverDelayed]

Okay so this might be a silly question, but I was wondering if anyone knew where we got the whole red and blue thing from?

I started thinking about it last week when I saw Billy Bragg in concert. He said something in between songs about how we have it backwards, in the rest of the world red is the left and blue is the right. And the more I thought about it, that sounds about right. We call Communists red, but they're definitely not conservatives. And I think some of the conservative parties in Europe have blue as their color. So how did we come about labeling Republicans/conservatives as red and Democrats/liberals are blue?

[xshady121]

Wiki:

Although both major political parties (and many minor ones) use the traditional American red, white, and blue colors in their marketing and representations, since election night 2000 the color blue has become the identified color of the Democratic Party, while the color red has become the identified color of the Republican Party. That night, for the first time, all major broadcast television networks used the same color scheme for the electoral map: blue states for Al Gore (Democratic nominee) and red states for George W. Bush (Republican nominee). Since then, the color blue has been widely used by the media to represent the party, much to the confusion of non-American observers, as blue is the traditional color of the right and red the color of the left outside of the United States (c.f. red for the Liberals and blue for the Conservatives in Canada, or red for Labour and blue for Conservative in the United Kingdom). Blue has also been used by party supporters for promotional efforts (e.g ActBlue, BuyBlue, BlueFund) and by the party itself, which in 2006 unveiled the "Red to Blue Program" to support Democratic candidates running against Republican incumbents in the 2006 midterm elections.

[loveisdead]

I find it funny that the south used to vote straight democrat and the north straight republican. Weird how that completely changed.

[Burn That Shit]

I find it funny that the south used to vote straight democrat and the north straight republican. Weird how that completely changed.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Democrats and Republicans switch stances on a bunch of stuff during the great depression?

[mattybobviously]

It's nothing about the countries parties changing ideologies or locations.

For years, different mainstream media stations used different colors for their broadcasts on election night. It's why Regan's landslide win was described as a "sea of blue" by one commentator.

The 2000 presidential election was the first in which all major media stations used the same color for the candidates, and since then it has stuck, though it's entirely unofficial.

[open mind]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Democrats and Republicans switch stances on a bunch of stuff during the great depression?

i'm sure they did but the south really went republican as a result of the civil rights movement.

[GueroCanelo]

Also there's a certain stigma associated with communism in America, so if the liberal party were to choose red as its color some people might recall the "red scare." I mean, there's no way in hell you can link the republicans to much of anything that's socialist or even vaguely communist.

But this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states

Tim Russert invented it.

[wrppdarndyrfngr]

http://www.uniwatchblog.com/2008/11/06/hey-weve-made-a-joke-out-of-one-sport-so-why-not-shoot-for-another/

On Tuesday I had a short Page 2 piece about how counterintuitive it is for red — normally a leftist-associated color — to be the unofficial “team color” of the Republican party (in case you missed it, scroll to the middle of this page (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/index?archive=081104)). That prompted a response from Josh Starr, who said he could explain the “real history” behind the way red and blue got assigned to the two major parties. Here’s his story:
I was a polling analyst for Mark Penn and Doug Schoen in 1995, when we were brought in by Dick Morris and Bill Clinton to do the polling for Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign.
In 1995 and 1996, there were private weekly meetings (Wednesday nights) held in the White House residence on Wendesday nights to plan the campaign. It was a small group (Clinton, Morris, Penn, Schoen, Al Gore, Leon Panetta, Bob Squier, Bill Knapp, George Stephenopolous, maybe a few others). These meetings were later detailed, I believe after the election, by The New York Times.
For each week’s meeting, I would develop maps of the status of the electoral college, as well as maps of media buys and visits by the Clinton and Dole campaigns. At the time, mapping software was making it easier to create these kinds of maps. I was known as “the Map Guy.”
When you sit down to develop an electoral map, you have to actively decide which colors to use. I did some research at the library (this was before the extensive online resources we have today) and found that the networks were inconsistent in their assignment of colors to the different parties, so that wasn’t helpful. And the parties themselves tended to use red, white, and blue — again, no help.
So I decided to assign the Democrats blue and Republicans red. I wavered between green and yellow for “toss-ups.”
After a few weeks of meetings using these maps, Mark Penn came back to my office (something he rarely did) and said something like, “Josh, they love the maps, they’re a big hit. The President loves it.” He then said the President had asked him why we chose these colors for the parties.
As I explained to Mark, there were several reasons. For one, the term “Blue Dog Democrats” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition) was thrown around in the early and mid-’90s, so the association stuck with me. In addition, we were centrist Democrats and I never liked the association of our party with red communism. So I wanted to symbolically throw the red back at the Republicans. I also saw the Republicans as more angry/red in the face/out of control, since this was the era of the Newt Gingrich and the Contact with America. In addition, I associated red with a “red light” and stopping, while blue connotes something more positive and forward-thinking. All of these were reasons that went into my decision.
So that was the genesis of the color selection.
From these meetings, the shorthand vernacular turned to using the terms “red states” and “blue states” and spread from the private meetings to conversations with political professionals and the media. By 2000, these terms had been part of the DC language for years.
The funny thing is, I am a public opinion researcher and we never tested the branding impact of the colors red and blue — yet this is one decision that (unintentionally) has had long-lasting brand implications.
Accurate? I have no idea. But it’s pretty fascinating.

[ForeverDelayed]

Thanks for the answers. My curiousity has been satisfied. Thumbs up.