I don't know how the color switch came about myself; I have a real old historical atlas at home with election maps in it, that shows the Republicans as orange and the Democrats as dark green. However, I disagree that we need to reverse the current red & blue. Here's what I wrote about it for my website:
"Apparently liberalism now means the opposite of what it used to mean. Liberals used to be populists; now they're elitists. Whereas they used to favor human rights and the spread of democracy, now they don't care; note their lack of enthusiasm for the recent elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how Jimmy Carter went from being the human rights president to the former president who never met a dictator he didn't like. The Democratic Party used to portray itself as 'the party of love'; now, except on the gay-marriage issue, it's the party of hate. Most telling of all, liberals used to embrace change for its own sake, but now they're often afraid to try any new policy, calling it a 'risky scheme.'
Along those lines, it is appropriate that the media now refers to the states that vote Republican as 'red.' Red is the color of revolution, and the vision of a global people's revolution has passed to those who call themselves conservatives. In response the Left has become reactionary, a victim of the Hegellian/Marxist dialectic that once encouraged them to think that history was on their side."
I suppose you could look at it like that. I think they made the switch themselves as a little cosmetic surgery to attempt to change their personna...you know red/communist, etc.