Color-Coding Politics

During the 2000 Presidential election between George H. W. Bush and Al Gore, journalists often used the terms blue states and red states to describe the political landscape within the United States. This article studies the framing of these terms during the years 2004 through 2007. Using latent and manifest qualitative content analyses, six different news media frames were found in a sample of 337 newspaper articles. Two hypotheses were also tested indicating that framing patterns varied slightly by time period and article types. However, the argument that increased levels of political polarization in the United States have been created by predominantly conflict-oriented coverage may not be true. Instead, these terms became journalistic heuristics that were used to organize how people think about politics in a way that fit with contemporary media practices, and there is no single agreed upon interpretation of these terms within this reporting.