Blue state
The term blue states describes those U.S. states that vote for the Democratic Party in presidential elections, the only national elections held in the United States.
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 blue states tend to be in the Northeast, Upper Midwest and Pacific Coast, with the Great Plains, South and the remainder of the Midwest being red states.
The solid "blue states" would generally be California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont, Maine and Michigan. 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 Florida, which is quite liberal in the cities, but rather conservative in rural areas such as the Panhandle.
Blue states have several demographic differences from red states, thus the term now has cultural implications as well, implying a liberal region or a more liberal type of American. The most typical is that the majority of blue states tend to be more urban, have higher per capita government expenditures, and are more multicultural.
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