[AUsome Joy]

And when did this red blue state thing get switched??

[svcw]

I do not know Joy, seems to me sometime around Clinton. Might be interesting and probably doesn’t matter kind of research, but then I wont have to do the laundry. ;-)

[treetopsandroofs]

“And when did this red blue state thing get switched??”

When the freaks and anti-American communists/socialists realized they needed more stealth to “fundamentally transform” America.

[Montanabound]

Wasn’t it Tim Russert’s stupid chart that switched red and blue a few elections ago?

[svcw]

Well, I did look it up.
Apparently, when color coding was first used in the olden days on TV as below and changed in 2000.
So there we go.

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* Originally states were color coded as shown on TV:
Republicans being associated with blue-bloods and old money, hence blue; and Democrats with liberal agendas and red being the color of revolution

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“Today” show on October 30, 2000 to refer to those states of the United States whose residents predominantly vote for the Republican Party or Democratic Party presidential candidates, respectively. A blue state tends to vote for the Democratic Party, and a red state tends to vote for the Republican Party. According to AlterNet and The Washington Post, the terms were coined by journalist Tim Russert, during his televised coverage of the 2000 presidential election.

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David Nyhan in the Boston Globe on October 15, 1992: “But when the anchormen turn to their electronic tote boards election night and the red states for Clinton start swamping the blue states for Bush, this will be a strange night for me.”

Nyhan’s column, he refers to red states as Democratic states and blue states as Republican states — just the opposite of current usage. As the Washington Post explained a few days ago:

In 1976, NBC identified states won by Gerald Ford in blue and Jimmy Carter’s states in red. On election night in 1980, ABC News showed Ronald Reagan’s march to the White House as a series of blue lights on a map, with Carter’s states in red. Time magazine assigned red to the Democrats and blue to the Republicans in its election graphics in every election from 1988 to 2000. The Washington Post’s election graphics for the 2000 election were Republican-blue, Democrat-red.

Although there was never any kind of consensus on this, prior to 2000 it was more common to associate red with Democrats and blue with Republicans.

[Spunky]

I had wondered the same thing because as I grew up I had identified Republicans with blue signs and Democrats with red signs. It appears that in 2000 is when the left called us red states.

"The terms red states and blue states came into use in the United States presidential election of 2000 on an episode of the "Today" show on October 30, 2000 to refer to those states of the United States whose residents predominantly vote for the Republican Party or Democratic Party presidential candidates, respectively."

From: Red State-Blue State