WHEN WERE GREENBOOKS USED TV
Here’s something else we know: All the maps-on TV stations and Web sites election night and in newspapers the next morning-will look alike. If enough become blue, Biden will move in on January 20, 2020. If enough of these battleground states turn red, President Donald Trump will remain in the White House four more years. Ultimately, a handful of battleground states-including Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona-will determine the winner, starting out in neutral tones before shifting, one by one, to red or blue.
As evidenced by the 2016 presidential election, forecasts are just that. The country’s geographic center, meanwhile, will likely be awash in red. Come November 3, pundits predict that the West Coast, the Northeast and parts of the upper Midwest will likely be bathed in blue. Twenty years later, in a vitriolic presidential race shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic and a growing divide between liberal and conservative Americans, former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden is ahead in the polls and forecasts.
Not only did it give us “hanging chads” and a crash course in the Electoral College, not only did it lead to a controversial Supreme Court ruling and a heightened level of polarization that has intensified ever since, the Election That Wouldn’t End gave us a new political shorthand. The notion that there were “red states” and “blue states”-and that the former were Republican and the latter Democratic-wasn’t cemented on the national psyche until the year 2000.Ĭhalk up another one to Bush v. That’s right: In the beginning, blue was red and red was blue and they changed back and forth from election to election and network to network in what appears, in hindsight, to be a flight of whimsy. NBC declared Carter the winner at 3:30 a.m. Light bulbs on each state changed from undecided white to Republican blue and Democratic red. 2, Studio 8-H at 30 Rockefeller Center lit up. And when election results flowed in Tuesday night, Nov. We then had to bring in gigantic interior air conditioning and fans to put behind the thing to cool it.” “The thing started to melt when we turned all the lights on. “There were thousands of bulbs,” recalled Roy Wetzel, then the newly minted general manager of NBC’s election unit. Although the map was buttressed by a sturdy wood frame, the front of each state was plastic. At the urging of anchor John Chancellor, NBC had constructed the behemoth map to illustrate, in vivid blue and red, which states supported Republican incumbent Gerald Ford and which backed Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter. It was early October, 1976, the month before the map was to debut-live-on election night. Television’s first dynamic, color-coded presidential map, standing two stories high in the studio best known as the home to “Saturday Night Live,” was melting.
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