Should we force parties to alternate colors every so many years, like every four or so?
:doh
Damn, messed this one up.
No poll options.
Speak your mind.
I do not believe any party should have a permanent claim on a color.
So I would be more than fine with forcing a switch.
I think it is stupid changing it every 4 years and it could lead to confusion.So I am against changing it.
Here is a little history on it the color usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states
Before the 2000 presidential election, the traditional color-coding scheme was "Blue for Republican, Red for Democrat,"[3] in line with historical European associations (red was used for left-leaning parties).[4] Traditional political mapmakers, at least throughout the 20th century, have used blue to represent the modern-day Republicans, and the Federalists who preceded them. Perhaps this was a holdover from the days of the Civil War when the predominantly Republican North was “Blue”.[3] However, at that time a maker of widely sold maps accompanied them with blue pencils to mark Confederate force movements and red pencils to mark Union force movements.[5]
Even earlier, in the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison used maps that coded blue for the Republicans, the color Cleveland perceived to represent the Union and "Lincoln's Party", and red for the Democrats.[6
skip....
Contemporary usage
The advent of color television prompted television news reporters to rely on color-coded electoral maps, though sources conflict as to the conventions they followed. One source claims that in the six elections prior to 2000 every Democrat but one had been coded red.It further claims that from
1976 to
2004, the broadcast networks, in an attempt to avoid favoritism in color-coding, standardized on the convention of alternating every four years between blue and red the color used for the incumbent party.[SUP]
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[10][/SUP] According to another source, in 1976,
John Chancellor, the anchorman for
NBC Nightly News, asked his network's engineers to construct a large illuminated 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 incumbent Republican president, 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, though not all using the same color scheme. NBC continued to use the color scheme employed in 1976 for several years. NBC newsman
David Brinkley famously referred to the 1980 election map outcome as showing
Ronald Reagan's 44-state landslide as resembling a "suburban swimming pool".[SUP]
[11][/SUP]
