The studies show such maps tend to inflate perceptions about margins of victory and may lead to discouraged voters who see their votes as counting for less.
The problem is not with the colors, but with the winner-takes-all nature of the two-color map legend, said researcher Rémy A. Furrer, who was a graduate student in social psychology at UVA when he was involved in the studies along with UVA psychology professor Adrienne Wood.
“We went into this with the idea of hue being one of the mechanisms for the polarization of voting estimates, but what we eventually found out is that the actual hues didn’t have an effect,” said Furrer, who is now a postdoctoral researcher applying psychology to bioethics at Harvard Medical School.
What emphasized the divide was the dichotomous representation of voting margins as either Republican or Democrat without representing vote totals of both parties at the local level.
That lack of granular voting information across states led voters to overestimate the margin of victory for the winning party, the research indicates.
“The main findings were that, when presented with dichotomous coloring as opposed to continuous gradations, people overestimated the voting margins and reported that their vote would have mattered less,” Furrer said.

Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-North Dakota, met with J. Miles Coleman of the UVA Center for Politics in 2019 and signed a copy of Coleman’s election map of her 2012 victory for the U.S. Senate. (Contributed photo)
The study also found that creating a map with continuous hue and lightness gradients reflecting results at the state level would more accurately depict votes of both Republicans and Democrats. It also showed that providing people with a better visual representation of actual victory margins can make them feel that their vote matters more in states with narrow margins.
“When we represented the voting margins with continuous gradients, the participants thought their vote would have been more influential than with dichotomous gradient steps in winner-take-all maps,” Furrer said. “[Voters] believe that, if the voting margins are smaller, their vote matters more, even though all votes matter in the grand scheme of things.”
The current labels of red and blue states are not rooted in American political tradition. They are the result of news media coverage of previous presidential elections. The colors became a part of American political rhetoric during the 2000 contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, which came down to a thin margin of fewer than 2,000 votes in Florida.
The election took more than a month, several lawsuits and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to resolve. It was finally settled with Bush getting one vote more than the 270 needed to win the Electoral College.