Democrats and Republicans Are Associated With a Color, but Where Do They Come From?

The modern electoral map that we see every four years during the presidential election is defined by two colors: red and blue. Red states are states that a Republican won, and blue states are states that a Democrat won.

It wasn't always this way, though. The 1980 election featured a map swimming with blue, but that map was signifying the victory of Republican Ronald Reagan. In fact, according to CNN, our modern associations with red for Republicans and blue for Democrats are actually just a few decades old. Here's where they come from:

For much of both parties' histories, neither one had an official color, and that didn't ultimately matter all that much. TV news coverage and newspapers themselves were in black and white, so associating a party with a color didn't make all that much sense. After network TV switched to color and began covering the presidential elections that way, they adopted the model used by our friends across the pond.

In the U.K., the Conservative Party is associated with blue, and the Labour party is associated with red. That's how it was in the U.S., too, until a fateful change was made. The first time a switch occurred was in 1984, when Reagan was labeled red on ABC. ABC justified the decision by simply stating that the "R" association made sense. "Republican, Reagan, Red."

CBS made the switch the same year, and then CNN switched in 1992 and NBC followed suit in 1996. There was no apparent coordination between these networks about the decision. Eventually, they all just followed one another until by 2000, Republicans were firmly associated with red, and Democrats were associated with blue. Since then, there's been no looking back, and the parties themselves have even leaned into those colors.

While it might theoretically have been possible for the networks to switch the color scheme again, the 2000 election was pivotal because it was so close, and the color-coded maps became crucial to help average voters understand what the actual outcome was. Was Florida blue or red? That became a question that defined not just Election Day but the days and weeks afterward, and those colors became key to our understanding of the race more generally.

Now, it would be hard to switch up the color scheme again without confusing voters. As the stakes of each election have felt more and more all-encompassing for supporters of both parties, the colors associated with them have come to matter more as well, even though there is no intrinsic reason why these colors match these parties.

It's all completely arbitrary, but that doesn't mean it hasn't come to matter a great deal. As results come in for the 2024 election, the colors of certain specific states are going to matter a huge amount to the future of the country, even the exact colors that were chosen for those states aren't all that filled with history.