Why is the Republican party coloured red and the Democratic party blue, even though red symbolises left-wing policies (such as communism) and blue right-wing policies throughout the rest of the world?

22 comments

1. It was set by news stations in the 60s and 70s as colored broadcasts become more common, independent of the rest of the world. Besides, oranges, greens, purples, and yellows all mean different things in different countries too

   https://youtu.be/yD0POrq1UFk

2. I’m pretty sure it’s just because those where the colors a news agency used for the election back in the 80s. It just stuck I suppose.

3. Party flip sometime during the Cold War, I can’t tell you why they flipped though.

4. It’s generally been red and blue (even before TV, in print media) since those are the colors in the American flag; however, historically there was no uniformity. Some media assigned colors consistently by party (The Washington Post and the New York Times did this, using opposite color schemes), while others assigned colors based on the party of the incumbent president (often alternating by election, meaning that Republicans would have been a different color in 1988 than they’d been in 1984, though by the late 1990s NBC assigned blue for the incumbent party).

   In 2000, CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC, all for different reasons, had states won by Gore in blue and Bush in red. Given the unclear outcome that year for the first time in the modern media era, those maps got repeated over and over, people started writing and talking about “red states” and “blue states”, and these color associations got locked in to the popular mind.

5. Red and blue are symbols, we can assign them any meaning we want

6. Here’s a short history of it:
   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states

   To my mind, the particular reason it stopped flipping around was the use of the term “red state” and “blue state”, rather than (say) “this state went Republican” and “this state went Democrat”- once that became a normal expression, news organizations adopted the same color scheme rather than keep insisting “on this network, we use *yellow* and blue” or whatever.

   As usual, “but the rest of the world does it” arguments really don’t have any bearing.

7. Red and blue for the major parties wasn’t really crystallized until 2000. Historically it wasn’t standard that GOP was red and Democrats were blue, but inconsistent.

8. Some politician wore a red tie one time, so his opponent wore a blue one. Now American politicians have team colors.

9. It was the news coverage of the 2000 election. Before that, no one thought Republican = red, Democrats = blue.

   On election night, every tv network’s news department makes maps showing the election results state-by-state. And historically, it was pretty random which color went with which party. It might change from year to year on any given network, and it certainly differed from one network to another.

   But 2000 was the Bush v. Gore, “hanging chads” election, where the wrangling over who actually won went on for weeks after election day. NBC news used red=R, blue=D, and referred to their map again and again over those weeks of uncertainty. NBC politics news coverage has always been strong, and guys like Tim Russert were trusted to sort out the confusion during a particularly confusing political moment. A lot of air time was spent discussing the “what ifs” of the vote count — What if Florida moves from blue to red? What if Ohio moves from red to blue? Eventually, the colors’ new meaning started to become fixed.

   By the time the Supreme Court called Florida, and NBC made it red on their map, everybody knew what red meant now.

10. The only time I’ve seen ‘the rest of the world’ use Red and blue to mean Communism vs Capitalism is on the political compass. I’ve never heard of it elsewhere.

11. So we’re under some obligation to do things the same way as the rest of the world? Have you met the US?

12. Counterpoint: The Tories are red, and also right-wing.

13. As others have stated, it was the 2000 election. Before that, each network had their own color scheme. I remember watching the map colored blue for Reagan on election night in ’80.

14. We aren’t the rest of the world and don’t follow communist’s color schemes.

15. Agreed about the 2000 election. The Republicans happened to be red that year on the election maps some networks used and after the months of wrangling about the outcome and the lawsuits, those maps had been seen so many times it became a permanent association. I consider it a stupid mistake. Red should definitely be Democrats. It’s a historical accident. Neither red nor blue was a common symbol for either party. We didn’t use particular colors to represent political parties, like some countries do. Both parties here used red, white and blue widely for banners and signs and buttons – the normal American, patriotic political colors.

    You can see this Democratic campaign button from 1996 and this Republican campaign poster from 1996 use equal parts red, white and blue. (In truth, both have more blue than red.)

    [https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/clinton-gore-political-campaign-button-1992/jwH0t9xDA92Z1A](https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/clinton-gore-political-campaign-button-1992/jwH0t9xDA92Z1A)

    [http://democraticbuttons.freeservers.com/DoleKemp2.jpg](http://democraticbuttons.freeservers.com/DoleKemp2.jpg)

16. Massachusetts has colored ballots: Red for Democrats and Blue for Republican.

17. It’s not true for all of the “rest of the world”. Western countries, mostly, but it can be weird.

    South Korea and Japan use the same scheme as the US with blue left and red right. Taiwan uses blue for right, green for left (the opposite of Japan, though right wingers alternate between green and red in Japan: also Taiwanese politics are a bit iffier than simple left/right.)

    Even Western countries are different. Germany is mostly black (right) vs red (left), blue has no meaning there. Red means left in Canada, but a centrist left vs orange.

    Orange (third most common) means left wing in Canada and sorta left wing in Britain, center-right in Poland and far right in South Africa.

    Yes it kinda works as a generic rule, but countries aren’t all the same

18. It’s wild cause I’m old enough to remember the 2000 election as a teenager but I had no idea that that’s when Red and blue were solidified

19. It was an accident of the 2000 election. Before then, they’d do it randomly, it was only a one day kind of thing, to color states as they were called for one party or the other. But the 2000 election dragged on and on, and the color-matches got ossified.

20. I’m pretty sure neither party wants to be connected with communism in any way, shape, or form

21. So the color coding comes from election maps shown on TV–but until perhaps the late 1990’s the colors used were all over the map. (No pun intended.)

    I remember, for example, when a Presidential election was color-coded using green and a sort of orangish-yellow. Each station picked a color scheme that would reproduce in contrasting colors on [NTSC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC) broadcast television. (NTSC: “Never The Same Color”)

    I do believe that when the color scheme was finally cemented around 2000 or so, there was a conscious decision not to make the Democrats “red”, so as to avoid the “red == communism” connotation, despite the fact that Democrats are our “Leftist” party, if the US can be said to have a “leftist” party as compared to Europe.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-republicans-were-blue-and-democrats-were-red-104176297/

22. Merica