Per Tom Brokaw on Scarborough this morning, NBC created the first electoral map for television for the 1976 election. They had Republicans as blue because they thought that the color blue was more closely associated with the right: blue chips, blue blood, etc. Red, on the other hand, was traditionally the color of leftist parties in Europe, and so they assigned red to the dems.
ABC changed up the scheme for the 1984 election, because they were concerned that they might be accused of trying to imply that democrats were associated with communists. So, the color scheme was reversed, and the other networks followed suit.
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