DETROIT – Several years ago, the mother of a couple teenagers called me to ask if I knew off the top of my head which states were red and which were blue. I told her if she meant how they had voted in the last presidential election, the answer was yes … but why?
“We’re taking a family vacation, and don’t want to stay overnight in any red states,” she said. I laughed, and thought how crazily bizarre that sounded. But before long, I started hearing people talk about “red” and “blue” states as if they were alternative universes.
Soon, I heard discussions about religious differences between “red” and “blue” people. When I heard a food critic talking about the differences between what “blue” and “red” people ate, I realized that somehow we had slipped into a strange world that would have been unimaginable as recently as say, the 1990s.
Virtually everyone knows where the idea of “red” and “blue” come from: The maps the networks use to color the states on Election Night, with red for Republicans and blue for Democrats.
But we need to remember that this hasn’t always been the case. It dates only to the rise of color television, and became a part of American culture only with the dawn of this century. For years, different networks used different colors. ABC experimented with yellow and blue. The idea of a color-coded map first really caught on when NBC created a gigantic one for the 1976 presidential election. But that year, they had states carried by the Republican candidate, Michigan’s Gerald Ford, in blue, and Democrat Jimmy Carter’s in red.
Not till the year 2000 did blue for the Democrats and red for the Republicans become standard, and then something happened to sear those colors into our memories.
That was the year of the disputed election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, and every night for more than a month, television networks constantly showed the famous map, with the nation divided into red and blue, with Florida waiting to be colored.
After that, red for Republicans and blue for Democrats became imprinted on all our brains. But something else happened too.
More and more states became frozen into support for one party or the other. This wasn’t always so. From the 1950s through the 1990s, both parties hotly competed for most states, and things were very volatile. In 1964, the Democratic presidential nominee won 44 of the 50 states. Eight years later, the Republicans won 49.
Every state voted Democratic at least once and Republican at least once between 1964 and 1996. But gradually, things ossified.
Want proof? Since 2000, 35 of the 50 states have voted for the same party, every time. Ninety percent of the states voted the same way in 2020 as they did four years before. Only five states switched, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, and that produced a mirror image result.
President Trump won states with 306 electoral votes in 2016 and President Biden won states with 306 electoral votes in 2020. We have no idea what the result will be this time, but we know President Biden isn’t going to bother campaigning in Oklahoma or Idaho. Nor will Donald Trump try to win Massachusetts or Maryland.
How long will the country remain locked in this electoral college cold war? What we do know is that over time, parties, as well as ideologies, change. For most of a century after the Civil War, the Republican Party was virtually non-existent in most of the Old South. GOP candidates in South Carolina usually got less than four percent of the vote. No state is that one-sided now.
Even within our current, mostly frozen red-blue world, there is some movement. Virginia, reliably red in 2004, is now strongly blue in presidential elections, while Iowa has moved from blue to red. Nor is any state a monolith. Texas hasn’t voted blue in nearly half a century, but its capital, Austin, votes overwhelmingly Democratic.
California gave President Biden the biggest popular vote plurality of any state in history four years ago. But six million Californians still voted for Donald Trump.
News flash: Regardless of what the politicians and their ads want you to think, despite the fact that people too often live in two propaganda worlds, one fueled by Fox and one by MSNBC, most “blue” and “red” people don’t see everybody on the other team as evil.
At least, we should hope not. They may not even see them as red or blue, but as fellow Americans, even if politically wrong-headed.
I clearly remember that on the morning after the close and bitterly fought 1976 presidential election, the losers felt bad, but bad in a way similar to that University of Michigan fans feel when they lose to Ohio State. Nobody said it was a stolen election, or that the other side was evil. Nobody refused to recognize the result.
Instead, the politicians and people got on with their lives. Somehow, we need to create a world like that again.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
