Color me confused
Several times recently, I've run into people who claim that red has always represented Republicans and blue the Democrats. There was just one problem in my mind. I don't remember that being the case. While allowing that my young age prohibits any amount of certainty in my memory, I do remember watching returns from the 1992 presidential election. The news anchors were showing state-by-state results in bar graphs which were red, blue and yellow. That was Perot's year, hence the third color. If I remember correctly, the colors were either shuffled from state-to-state or were uniformly Bush=red, Clinton=blue, Perot=yellow.
I don't remember getting the impression at that point that the colors were set in stone. It's only recently that the results have been color-coded so consistent using GOP red and Democrat blue.
Now people have often noted with irony, whether interested in the history or not, that the colors really should be reversed, if we are going to be consistent with the consistent world-wide use of red by leftist regimes. My observations of Canadian politics follows that train of thinking as well: The Liberal Party has an official color of red, the Conservatives of blue (hard to take too seriously though since they have party logos that remind one of sports teams).
The political parties in the United States have never felt bound by such delineations, though. Remember, our party symbols are animals and the artistic impressions of them are both red, white and blue.
So what inspired this post? Well, someone is upset, or at least a little irritated with the current arrangement and decided a t-shirt was one way to express it in fine detail. Their history is correct. The Reagan victories (or at least one of them) was illustrated by the media using "Reagan blue." That's just fact.
Frankly, I wonder whether the maker of the t-shirt is more upset by being designated by the color red than by that arbitrary decision being made by random news media producers.
Here's his suggested Obama victory map:
Yeah, a little over the top, but oh well.
So the question:
Do you care enough about this issue to by a shirt and wear it proudly around your fellow political nerd friends?
I don't remember getting the impression at that point that the colors were set in stone. It's only recently that the results have been color-coded so consistent using GOP red and Democrat blue.
Now people have often noted with irony, whether interested in the history or not, that the colors really should be reversed, if we are going to be consistent with the consistent world-wide use of red by leftist regimes. My observations of Canadian politics follows that train of thinking as well: The Liberal Party has an official color of red, the Conservatives of blue (hard to take too seriously though since they have party logos that remind one of sports teams).
The political parties in the United States have never felt bound by such delineations, though. Remember, our party symbols are animals and the artistic impressions of them are both red, white and blue.
So what inspired this post? Well, someone is upset, or at least a little irritated with the current arrangement and decided a t-shirt was one way to express it in fine detail. Their history is correct. The Reagan victories (or at least one of them) was illustrated by the media using "Reagan blue." That's just fact.
Frankly, I wonder whether the maker of the t-shirt is more upset by being designated by the color red than by that arbitrary decision being made by random news media producers.
Here's his suggested Obama victory map:
Yeah, a little over the top, but oh well.So the question:
Do you care enough about this issue to by a shirt and wear it proudly around your fellow political nerd friends?
Labels: fun, Politics as usual
posted by Mark at 5:24 PM
This is an artifact of the 2000 Presidential Campaign. Before that, the custom in television media was to switch between red and blue for the Dems and the GOP every four years.
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