I've been meaning to ask this for quite a while (i.e. more than three years) but have never really gotten around to it. So here goes:

Exactly who made the decision to switch the party-representative colors for State victories in the 2000 election?

If my (admittedly faulty) memory serves, the Republican Party was always signified with blue, and the Democratic Party was signified with red. Wiseacre observers could note that Labour in the United Kingdom was also symbolized by the color red, and usually make some crack about the two primary left-wing parties of the UK and US were linked to Communists.¹ Conversely, the Republican-voting States were supposed to be blue, somehow symbolizing the 'blue-blood' WASP sensibilities of the party as a whole.²

Of course, this was reversed for the 2000 election, and it's played havoc with my personal preferences in the matter. I liked being symbolized by blue. It's the primary color in Virginia's flag, and it's one of the colors of both my undergraduate and graduate institutions. Blue is, in a word, a favorite color.

Instead, I'm now stuck with red. Paul Begala writes some fatuous column about how the 'red' States stood for anger or something and how every State that voted for George W. Bush was a seething hotbed of intolerance, racism, oppression, hatred, and probably pet torture, and I thought it didn't apply.

Anyways. Three years on, the 'red State, blue State' thing is firmly embedded in the body politic, and I don't understand why. I'm a conservative, for crying out loud. I don't like change, especially when it comes "out of the blue" (no pun intended) and reverses a time-honored tradition.

Just about the time you get used to something, someone goes and changes it. That's probably a universalizable maxim, but recognizing that fact doesn't necessarily mean that I like or willingly accept that fact. Augh.

¹ Full disclosure: I made jokes along this line about it being highly appropriate for the Democrats to be symbolized by red, the official color of Communism.

² Or something like that; at the point where I heard the description, I wasn't particularly listening to what the other side had to say.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 11:08 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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