“I could not understand why the Conservative States got labeled “Red”. Who made that decision anyhow?”
That all stems from a map that was published on the internet after Bush (finally!) defeated Gore in 2000.
The map showed the county by county results of the election, which, geographically, was overwhelmingly for Bush. The person who made the map used red for the Republican counties and blue for the dem ones. That nomenclature just stuck, even though it was 180 degrees from the color scheme that had been used in the past.
I doubt the original mapmaker, or artist, or whatever we might call him or her meant anything bad by it, they probably didn’t even know about what had been used before.
“That all stems from a map that was published on the internet after Bush (finally!) defeated Gore in 2000.”
I remember some of the discussion during that time. The map was presented with red for D and blue for R. The blue overwhelmed the red and it was decided in the end that the contrast looked better using the red R and blue D color scheme.
These discussions threads are somewhere in the FR archives.