Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly reveals, via a commenter on his site, the origin of the color scheme that led to all this unnecessarily divisive talk of "red states" and "blue states". It turns out that, in 2008, Republican states are scheduled (according to the past pattern, at least) to be colored blue and Democratic states red. Yet another reason to abandon all further use of the terms "red state" and "blue state".
Of course, my original reasons still stand as well.
Here's a further illustration, using my state: the apparently very "red" state of Texas.
According the Dave Liep's Election Atlas 2,827,835 Texans voted for Kerry, while 4,519,262 voted for Bush. That means if 845,714 of this latter group switched their vote, Texas's electoral votes would go to Kerry and the entire political world would be turned upside down.
Using figures from the U.S. Census, Texas's population in 2004 is approximately 22,541,000.
So that means Texas is labelled "red" due to the decisions of 3.75% of the population of our state.
3.75%!
Perhaps we're not as "red" as everyone thinks.
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