Red states
The term red states describes those U.S. states that vote for the Republican Party in presidential elections, the only national elections held in the United States.
File:2000-election map.jpg
Map of results by state of U.S. presidential election, 2000.
The origin of the term is from television newscasts that reveal on presidential election night which party's candidate has carried which states in the U.S. Electoral College usually through a map of the country with the states projected to go to one party or another (Republican or Democratic) lit up in one primary color or another - specifically red or blue. Originally, the color assignments alternated every four years. In the hotly-contested election of 2000, it was the Republicans' turn for red and the Democrats' turn for blue; and because the resulting map for that year (shown at right) revealed that support for each party followed a sharply defined geographical pattern, it has since become customary to refer to the Republican-leaning states as red states and the Democratic strongholds as blue states.
The red states tend to fall in The South, parts of the Great Plains and the "Lower Midwest" (the Midwest excluding the Upper Midwest, and rural Western regions of the country, with the Northeast and Pacific Coast being blue states.
Solid red states are Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming, which have not voted for a Democrat presidential candidate since 1964. Other strong red states include Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina and Texas, which have not voted Democrat since 1976.
Using the morphology advocated by Joel Garreau in his 1981 book The Nine Nations of North America and modified in a later book by James Patterson and Peter Kim - The Day America Told the Truth - the "moral regions" (from Patterson and Kim's schematic) of the New South, Old Dixie and Marlboro Country are thought to be solidly in the "red" column, as is the southern portion of the Granary (the "blue" regions being New England, Metropolis, the Pac Rim and the northern half of the Granary, with the remaining two regions - the Rust Belt and L.A.-Mex - being seen as evenly divided in their political sympathies).
Red states have several demographic differences from blue states, thus the term now has cultural implications as well, implying a conservative region or a more conservative type of American. The most typical is that the majority of red states tend to be more rural with agriculture being one of the most important industries. Red states also tend to be poorer and have fewer college graduates, but send far more members to join the U.S. military. Red states tend to be more actively religious and more overwhelmingly Christian.
The distinction between the two is far from clear cut, however. Minorities in all states tend to vote Democratic. Many states are divided, such as Pennsylvania which is quite conservative in the interior, but liberal around the urban centers of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
It should be noted that not all media outlets follow this standard. According to Federal Review's web site, the trend has been towards the use of blue for the incumbent and red for the challenger.