U.S. Politics: #14 Red Is Republican & Blue Is Democrat

The colors red and blue are symbols for the Republican and Democratic parties. But why?

Let's go back to 1972, when the first television network used colored maps to report election results, also when lots of Americans began to have color TVs. CBS created the first colored election map in U.S. TV history, with Republican blue and Democrats red. Wait, what? Well, blue was closely associated with the Union army led by Lincoln. But ABC News thought that red is Reagan. By 1996, ABC and CBS had used the now-famous Democratic blue and Republican red. And NBC only changed its colors to make it easier to understand.

Very soon, the familiar Republican red and Democratic blue colors stuck in American culture. But it wasn't until the 2000 election that the political term “red states” and “blue states” took hold.

There’s even this color for swing states, purple states because “red” mixed with “blue” is the color “purple”. What are swing states? They are states that vote for the red and sometimes the blue party.

Now do you get why red is Republican and blue is Democrat? I think these colors are a bit hard to understand, after all, it’s the opposite in other countries. At least it’s not blue for Republican and red for Democrat anymore!