Tangential question: given the Cold War memes of the "red scare" and "better dead than red", how/why did the Republican Party decide to keep that colour scheme?
I mean, if even the British Royal Family had to change its name from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor…
> how/why did the Republican Party decide to keep that colour scheme?
According to the Tampa Bay Times, the colors are fairly recent and largely a result of media depictions of electoral maps. It is not an official choice by the party.
That's the trick: they didn't keep it at all. By the time that colour scheme arose, the Cold War was long finished.
The idea of colour-coding the parties at all didn't really become widespread until 1980, and the exact colours in use weren't standard until the aftermath of the 2000 election - ABC had initially used yellow for Republicans, and even as late as 1996 The Washington Post, Time, and NBC were all still using blue for Republicans and red for Democrats, in line with the colour schemes of most other nations.
The Dems = blue/Reps = red thing wasn't actually a consistent thing until the 2000 election, when news agencies seemed to all start using it that way for electoral maps.
I'm also seeing a variety of results saying that prior to that, the incumbent party was typically shown as blue on graphics, and the challenging party was red. In 2000, those colors lined up with the current party associations (Gore being a dem like Clinton), and that election cycle was a publicized enough election that the colors stuck to the parties.
I mean, if even the British Royal Family had to change its name from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor…