Talk:United States presidential election maps

Colors

Theres a problem with colors in these maps. The majority of the time Democratic states are shown in Blue and Republican states are in Red. For most of the maps it is the other way around, except when it gets to the 2000 election, the colors are switched to how they normally are shown. I can understand the colors switching around Lincoln's time because thats when the Democrat and Republican partys switched ideals (i dont quite understand it myself, but i've read about it). But after Lincoln and up until today the Democratc are mostly represented with Blue colors and the Republicans are Red, so I think that should be corrected and changed, because it is quite confusing. Milk 19:21, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Television networks alternated colors; the "convention" whereby Democrats became blue and Republicans red is directly traceable to the 2000 election. There is no basis for stating that this pattern is "normal" and it most certainly does not date to the 19th century. The parties did not "switch ideals" either in the time of Lincoln; for the most part they remained two non-ideological national parties until the 1960s. The point about abruptly switching color patterns in 2000 is valid, however, so I have added a note.- choster 14:25, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

And uh, no, there was no switching of...what did you call it..."ideals" in the 1860's.

Democrats should be red and Republicans blue because ever since the orgins of "Right/Left" in the French Revolution, red has been the traditional international color of the Left (neo-liberal, radicals, "Progressives", Socialist, Social Democrats, Communists, etc.) and blue has been the traditional color of the Right (originally monarchists, now conservative, Christian Democrat, classical liberal, libretarian, tory capitalists, etc)

As for the parties "switching ideals" during Lincoln's day, whoever wrote this is an idiot. Since the Republicans did not exist before Lincoln's day, it would be hard for them to "switch".