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komponisto comments on The Red Bias - Less Wrong
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The GOP has only been identified as "red" since 2000. Before 2000, the GOP and Democrats alternated colors on electoral maps every 4 years.
I suspect that the 2000 color assignment stuck because Tim Russert's electoral maps were such a cultural touchstone from that year. It was after 2000 that a series of books emphasizing the red state/blue state cultural divide started appearing.
Also, the electoral map you show makes the GOP look "stronger" mainly because the area of the red states happens to be larger than the more densely populated blue states.
I'm not sure that's true. I recall the current color assignment being in place at least since 1992.
Incidentally, the UK has the "opposite" color pattern (Labour red, Conservative blue), which I must say I find jarring (even if historically understandable).
See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states) for some information on the U.S. and coloring maps.
The US is the unusual color scheme here though. Red is generally associated with the left, look at the flags of most communist countries, and party colors etc.
And I think it flipped only once not every four years, because when I look at the Reagan maps, he's blue in both of them!
It's not just the UK that uses the opposite colour scheme. Canada does too.
Here is Time's 1996 map (warning, it's a PDF).
I think knb might be wrong about the alternating thing, though. My understanding was that the left of center party was historically the "red" party and "blue" the conservative party, in the European tradition.
Edit: the problem is that now it has been standardized as red= Republican so every map on the internet is this way going back through the 70's.
From the Wikipedia article linked to by Bo102010:
My memories from the time would have been formed mainly from television rather than printed sources, so there you go. (Although one printed memory that does stand out is, of all things, the French magazine L'Express, which used the Democrat-blue/Republican-red scheme in a 1996 article showing Clinton's 1992 victory.)