You can use Dave Leip’s website, which has the proper colors for the parties, not the Orwellian newsspeak ones.
http://www.uselectionatlas.org/
Exactly—I think YouTube has some old election night footage and you can see “Democrat red” and “Republican blue”. (Did they switch because they wanted the Dems to be associated
with “blue collar workers”?
Wiki:
>>This unofficial system of political colors used in the United States is the reverse of that in most other long-established democracies, where Blue represents right-wing and conservative parties, and Red represents left-wing and social democratic parties...According to another source, in 1976, John Chancellor, the anchorman for NBC Nightly News, asked his network’s engineers to construct a large illuminated map of the USA. The map was placed in the network’s election-night news studio. If Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate that year, won a state, it would light up in red; if Gerald Ford, the Republican, carried a state, it would light up in blue. The feature proved to be so popular that four years later all three major television networks would use colors to designate the states won by the presidential candidates on Election Night, though not all using the same color scheme. NBC continued to use the color scheme employed in 1976 for several years. NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the 1980 election map outcome as showing Ronald Reagan’s 44-state landslide as resembling a “suburban swimming pool”. CBS, from 1984 on, used the opposite scheme: blue for Democrats, red for Republicans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states
Interesting that he shows Virginia as a red state.