Political Color-Coding & Voter Exploitation
When you look at Elizabeth Warren’s merchandise website, you see a collection of blue: navy blue hats, royal blue shirts, blue text on white pins. Likewise, in Bernie Sanders’ store, you’ll find blue beanies and sweatshirts, with red only used to emphasize key words in long blue phrases. This is the same for most Democratic candidates. Alternatively, Republicans rely on red. A glance of a red hat in a crowd leaves the impression of a MAGA cap, and Republican leaders rarely wear blue neckties. This red vs. blue color-coding has become so ingrained in American politics that it seems natural. We accept that red states are Republican and blue states are Democratic.
Political color-coding disguises itself as a long-held tradition. Especially to young voters, it seems as if party colors are fixed into the very foundation of American politics. This isn’t the case.
Before the 2000 presidential election, both parties used the entire American red, white, and blue to symbolize their campaigns, and colors were randomly assigned on election maps each year. In fact, during the 1980 election, Republicans were assigned blue on electoral maps. Ronald Reagan’s votes were blue, while Jimmy Carter’s were red. NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the election map outcome, which showed Reagan’s landslide win, as a “suburban swimming pool.” This red for liberals and blue for conservatives is standard for the rest of the world. For example, in both the United Kingdom and France, blue symbolizes the conservative party and red represents the left. NBC continued this color scheme until 1996, but neither party definitively claimed one color.
In 2000, however, electoral maps used blue for Democratic candidate Al Gore and red for Republican George W. Bush. On election night, neither Gore nor Bush had a majority vote to turn the maps blue or red. The initial result was so close that it forced a recount in Florida, which held the election for 36 days. When Florida was finally revealed to be a “red state,” Bush won in one of the closest elections in U.S. history. Likely because of this historic election’s stand-still turmoil, red and blue were solidified as polarized colors. Florida became permanently red, permanently the state that elected Bush, and all other states fell into their respective color schemes. This permanence was also due to the long-awaited use of full-color electoral maps by The New York Times and USA Today, first published in 2000.
The color choices were not given much thought. According to Archie Tse, senior graphics editor for The New York Times, their spread used red for Republicans because “red begins with r, and Republican begins with r.” When these colors became mainstream, politicians ran with them, now using the colors as widespread marketing tools.
Political color-coding has been intensified to transform voters into consumable products whose beliefs can be exploited.
This color-coding is one of the most successfully subtle tactics of America’s political polarization. It’s increasingly easy to stereotype everyone in the southern red states as extremely conservative, and blue states like California and Oregon are commonly believed to have liberal cultures. Candidates understand that they have a backing in their historically approving states, so “purple states,” or swing states, are targeted most in competitive campaigns. We have this clear-cut distinction of red vs. blue, but it isn’t as clean a divide as many Americans believe.
Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scholar at Harvard, states, “At the individual level, most Americans are ideological moderates rather than extremists, on both economic and moral issues.” Further, Stanford political science professor Morris P. Fiorina claims that each state actually has significant representation of both conservatives and liberals that win elections at all levels of government. When reaching beyond the extremely divided, sometimes blinding arena of political campaigns, it becomes more evident that the color of each U.S. state is not clearly “red” or “blue” but is rather a varying shade of purple.
The idea of entirely red and blue states dangerously simplifies the political process by creating a stigmatizing climate and an undereducated audience. The polarization of these color schemes has been intensified to transform voters into consumable products whose properties (beliefs) can be easily exploited and manipulated by political professionals. Political figures have used these colors to create approachable marketing techniques that clearly work. It is hard to imagine Donald Trump selling a royal blue MAGA hat.
America has turned complex and sometimes inscrutable political parties into simple primary colors.
We have turned complex and inscrutable political parties into simple primary colors, both helping and hurting American voters. Yes, political parties need to be simplified to resonate with a larger audience, but this ingrained color-coding does much more than that. It exists as Pavlovian marketing with no room for purple products.
We have started to define ourselves based on the color of our parties and their surface-level beliefs rather than their actual tactics, all because “red begins with r, and Republican begins with r.”