Daily Verse | Matthew 1:5-6
Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,
Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,
Obed the father of Jesse,
and Jesse the father of King David.

Tuesday’s Reading: Matthew 5-7

Tuesday and enquiring minds want to know: why red for Republicans and blue for Democrats? Who made that decision?

I think we can all agree that the red and blue have their origins in our flag of red, white and blue. Blue was also associated with the north during the Civil War, while gray was associated with the south. But how did we get to the current associations?

I always thought the designation of red for Republicans was because both red and Republican start with the letter “R.” Easy to remember.

But then there’s blue and Democrat. That doesn’t work. Where’s the alliteration?

I tried to name a color that starts with “D” but not “dark.” Red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, gray, orange, brown … there really isn’t a common color that starts with “D.” I had to go to a box of 64 crayons to find “Dandelion,” which is a muted yellow that leans orange, or “Denim” which is a vivid blue.

But no one is going to refer to, “red states and dandelion states” or “red states and denim states.” The first sounds like Democrats need to weed their garden. I mean, they wouldn’t do it themselves, but they’ll pay Pasquale who just crossed the southern border to do it. The second raises the question of whether Democrats wear jeans. They do if they are these jeans.

The point is that it’s not about alliteration. So, how did the colors come to be associated with each of the parties?

In the presidential election of 1976, our bicentennial year, NBC was the first network to debut an electronic electoral map using light bulbs that could turn red or blue. The colors followed the scheme used in Britain, where red was associated with liberal parties and blue was associated with more conservative parties.

The bulbs on NBC’s map turned red for Jimmy Carter, the Democrat, and blue for Gerald Ford, the Republican—exactly the opposite of what the colors mean today.

Over the next 25 years or so, multiple TV networks offered colored maps of the states during an election, with each network choosing its own color scheme. That proved confusing for the general public, since they could watch one network with one set of colors, and then see another network with a different set of colors.

That all came to an end in the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore, the Democrat, and George W. Bush, the Republican. That was the election of the hanging chads in Florida, and it dragged on for weeks while each side fought a legal battle over how (and if) the ballots would be counted.

As coverage of the controversy continued with persistent graphics over many weeks, a consensus emerged among the major networks to use the same designations with blue for Democrats and red for Republicans.

The red and blue designations cemented themselves in the mind of the public and has remained that way ever since.

Red is for Republicans; blue is for Democrats.

With the deep political divide in our country, the two colors are an efficient way to refer to states which tend to consistently vote one way or the other. It’s too broad a brush, of course, because even “deep blue” states, like New York, have hundreds of thousands or even millions of conservative voters living there—much to Kathy Hochul’s dismay who, if she had her way, would empty the state of them. And even deep red states, like Arizona, have liberals living among them who (*ahem*) “flipped” the state blue in 2020.

But the associations of red and blue have stuck. Not only are they an efficient way to designate the general voting patterns of a bloc of people, they also represent a way of life or a political philosophy.

If I say, “Texas is a red state,” I mean that it is a conservative, patriotic, fiercely independent, Second Amendment-loving population, even if Austin is a sour blueberry in a strawberry patch. If I say, “California is a blue state,” I mean that it is a smug, liberal, anti-American, fascist-loving, ideologically driven land of fruits and nuts on the Left coast.

Guess where I’ll move if I am forced to choose between the two?

The red and blue designations reinforce the divide between Americans of different political persuasions even as they are helpful as shorthand to talk about our differences.

Vote red in November.