Color coding

Via Gary Farber, here's a strange New York Times article pondering aloud how the "red state/blue state" coloring convention suddenly became set in stone in the popular imagination in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, despite not having existed previously. Their graphic shows various news sources in 2000 all happening to color Republican states red and Democratic states blue, but if I recall correctly, there was some major network that night (ABC?) that used the opposite convention. And I also remember TV guys describing Reagan's sweep in 1984 as a "blue wave", though I'm pretty sure that color coding was far from universal, too.

My theory about the modern tendency is that it's actually a reaction to the traditional association of red with far-left politics; Communism is so discredited in the US that nobody wants to be seen accusing Democrats of being Commies. But it wasn't a very strong tendency anyway, until discussions of the 2000 election mess froze an essentially arbitrary assignment.

Addendum: Oh, yeah, now I remember what I was going to say. In that article, Leatrice Eiseman of Pantone suggests replacing the color coding with stars for one party and stripes for the other. It shocks me that anyone associated with the graphic design industry would make a suggestion that bad—the meaningless visual buzz would make the diagram almost unreadable. I can imagine Edward Tufte's reaction already.

Speaking of election maps...

Dave Seip's historical presidential election atlas is a useful reference. (He also uses the opposite of the modern red/blue convention.)