Republicans are red and Democrats blue. But it wasn’t always that way

The idea of “red states” and “blue states” may feel deeply embedded in the symbolism of US politics, but before 2000 the colors were often the other way around.

CNN’s coverage of the 1980 US presidential election, broadcast just five months after the network’s launch, featured the analog predecessor of its now-essential election night prop: the “Magic Wall” electoral map. Visible behind a dedicated Election Desk at CNN’s Atlanta studio, the technology was far from magical (at one point, a producer is seen updating the map manually behind the anchors, his back to the camera). But as results poured in, the undeclared states changed color, one by one, until Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over incumbent Jimmy Carter turned the orange map almost entirely… blue. Over on NBC that night, newscaster David Brinkley joked that the western part of his network’s Republican-heavy map was so blue it was “beginning to look like a suburban swimming pool.” On CBS, meanwhile, Walter Cronkite told viewers that “the United States looks like it’s certainly red, white and blue… but mostly blue, tonight.” The idea that Republicans are red and Democrats are blue may, today, feel embedded in the symbolism, branding and vernacular — think “blue” states and “red” states — of US politics. But the current configuration has only been cemented in the public imagination since the 2000 US presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Until the turn of the millennium, the colors were often the “other” way around. But which you saw depended on where you got your news — and when, given that outlets sometimes switched their color-coding between elections. On that night in 1980, for instance, ABC was the outlier, showing Republicans as red, having used yellow for the party four years earlier. During the network’s 1984 election coverage, Brinkley, by then at ABC, offered a seemingly arbitrary on-air explanation for the decision: “Red, R, Reagan — that’s why we chose red.”