I don't remember the parties having any colors when I was a kid, though according to WP, the Dems and Reps did indeed sometimes use Red and Blue respectively. And of course everywhere but here, the left is "Red" and the right is "Blue". I think this has to do with the left being fond of waving red flags (an old symbol for a fight to the death) and the right usually being associated with asserting traditional hierarchies, which originally meant rule by so-called Blue Bloods ? people who had the right ancestors.
But the red flag became the symbol of the socialist movement, which has always been unpopular in the U.S. I think American liberals consciously avoided using red, so as to avoid assisting those who defined a commie as anybody to the left of Genghis Khan. So the standard color scheme never really caught on here. Meanwhile, the world socialist movement fell out of favor after the biggest Marxist state collapsed and the second-biggest basically switched over to intensive capitalism ? pretty much destroying the whole red-versus-blue image. Since Americans aren't great at historical memory, they were now free to re-invent the color scheme.
It's true that the current Red-State/Blue-State thing started out on TV. (WP says it was first used in the 2000 presidential coverage). But I think the main credit for its spread goes to the right, which embraced an image [wikimedia.org] that neatly illustrated their claim that liberals represent a group of people living in a few prosperous coastal states, and who completely ignore the needs of Americans in flyover states.
Note that redstate.com is an influential political blog, while bluestate.com belongs to an obscure lighting and design firm whose web site has been in parking mode since 2007 [archive.org].
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/YV9EJa7IXYs/chinas-yangtze-river-turns-red
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