[Alberta's Child]

Go back and look at the old TV coverage of those elections. There was generally no consistency in the Democrat-Republican color scheme from one election to the next — or even from one network to another.

It all changed in 2000 when it took weeks and weeks to finalize the election results — so the color-coded maps stayed around on TV news programs seemingly forever.

[rhinohunter]

Before Florida 2000 … different networks had differing conventions on the use of red and blue. SeeBS, for example, always used blue for the incumbent party. Other networks had their own conventions.

But that all changed when, during the media frenzy over the Florida 2000 election recount, the USA Today published a county map of the entire U.S. with the Bush counties shown in red and the Gore counties shown in blue. All the media and pundits latched onto this map for use in all their endless pontificating.

And those colors stuck to the 2 parties forever afterward…