RED is the socialists banner, and is exactly the reason why the socialist press switched overnight after the Carter election and started calling the free states "Red" and the socialist states "Blue".
Early on, some channels used a scheme of red for Democrats and blue for Republicans. The first television news network to use colors to depict the states won by presidential candidates was NBC.
In 1976, John Chancellor, the anchorman for the NBC Nightly News, asked his network's engineers to construct a large electronic 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. NBC continued to use the color scheme employed in 1976 for several years; NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the 1980 election map as showing Ronald Reagan's 44-state landslide as resembling a "suburban swimming pool".[6]
CBS, from 1984 on, used the opposite scheme: blue for Democrats, red for Republicans. ABC used yellow for one major party and blue for the other in 1976. However, in 1980 and 1984, ABC used red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. As late as 1996, there was still no universal association of one color with one party.[7] If anything, by 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while Time Magazine and the Washington Post used an opposite scheme.[8][9][10]
In the days following the protracted 2000 election, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On Election Night that year there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms "red states" and "blue states" entered popular usage in the weeks following the 2000 presidential election. Journalists began to routinely refer to "blue states" and "red states," even before the 2000 election was settled.[citation needed]
After the results were final, journalists stuck with the color scheme, as the December 2001 The Atlantic's cover story by David Brooks entitled, "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" illustrated. Thus, red and blue became fixed in the media and in many people's minds,[11] despite the fact that no "official" color choices had been made by the parties.
Tnx for the background. Despite the “convention,” I still think of republicans as blue and democrats as red. When someone says “red state” or “blue state,” I have to stop and think about which is which every single time.