Matt Lauer and Tim Russert on election night, 2000.
Note: The original publish date of this article was November 10, 2010. We are re-publishing as-is, with the exception of updating the links to external references, as needed.
While awaiting the mid-term election returns this week (whimper), a friend and I mused on the origin of red for republicans and blue for democrats. We theorized that the colors were assigned during the advent of color television. Turns out we were half right.
Contrasting colors work best for television graphics, and red and blue work nicely due to their association with the American flag. They were the standard used to denote the leanings of states during election coverage, but the colors were never solely associated with one party. It was the decision of graphic departments, and it was usually an arbitrary one. Oftentimes, the colors were reversed, with democrats being red, a color often associated with left-leaning political groups abroad.
It turns out that the colors were solidified with the parties sometime during the 2000 Bush/Gore Presidential election. Remember that? Thirty-six days of looking at Republican/Democrat or Republican/Democrat maps of the country, waiting to see who was going to be our President? Well, a never-ending news story like that can only go on for so long before all the news organizations start to drift toward a universal color coding system. Through no real effort of their own, the alleged culprit was NBC, and specifically, journalist Tim Russert.
About a week before the election, Matt Lauer and Russert were on NBC's Today show discussing the possible election outcomes. As a visual aid, they employed a color-coded map used by their sister network, MSNBC. The map displayed the projected Republican states as red, and the Democratic ones as blue. Tim Russert mused, "So how does [Bush] get those remaining 61 electoral red states, if you will?"
BAM! He allegedly planted the seed, although he denies birthing the terms red states and blue states, saying, "I'm sure I wasn't the first to come up with it." Nonetheless, after 36 days of recounts, non-stop news coverage and a David Letterman joke ("Make George W. Bush president of the red states and Al Gore head of the blue ones"), an official color scheme is what you end up with.