When the results of the Presidential Election are announced sometime Tuesday evening, news channels across the world will show a map of the United States and the different states coloured blue or red, depending on if they went to the Democrat or the Republican. Yet these colour associations are a fairly recent practice writes Jodi Enda:

• For most of American history, each television channel would determine for itself which colour to use to represent individual parties.
• The Republican and Democratic parties themselves would use blue to represent themselves and red to represent the other. This is because red was associated with communism and The Soviet Union during The Cold war.
• In the year 2000 red was used to represent Republicans because both began with the letter ‘r’.
• However it took so long for the Supreme Court to make their ruling on Bush v Gore that by the time the decision was made Americans were used to associating the two colours with the two parties.

Read more about how this is opposite to the system in England and why some are upset with the colours that each party has gotten, as well as the strange case of the vanished orange party, over here.

Source: The Smithsonian