In my first semester teaching at a small Georgia college, I offered a course on American Government. During the discussion of the Electoral College and the dilution of popular votes during the 1992 election, a student raised his hand and politely said “Professor Tures, I think your map is wrong.”

“How is that the case?” I responded. “Your map shows all of the states that Clinton won in red, and the states that Bush won in blue,” he responded. “I think they got it backwards.”

What the younger generation doesn’t realize is that the red and blue coloration of the Electoral College map was different “in the old days.” Before the contentious 2000 election, the party in charge of the Executive Branch at the time of the election was represented in blue, while the challenger party was represented in red.

That’s why the famous Saturday Night Live sketch of the Space Shuttle astronauts watching the 1984 election featured a black and white satellite map with Minnesota outlined in red, along with a blip for the District of Columbia.

So how did we get fixed on this whole “red state, blue state” designation? After the bitter 2000 election, both “camps” somehow decided that any state that voted for Al Gore was a permanent liberal bastion, while those places that cast a vote for George W. Bush were conservative havens.

As a result, the maps were redone in 2004 to show the Republican incumbent with “red” states and the Democratic challenger with “blue” states. Even “Wikipedia” redid all their recent Electoral College maps to reflect the change. This ignores the fact that throughout the world, free market parties choose a blue banner, while red is the color of socialism. Then again, after eight years of big government conservatism….but I digress.

So, are there permanent “red states” and “blue states?” To determine this, I analyze all presidential elections going back to 1988 to see which states voted Republican or Democrat in every election.

Using this formula, I find that there are eight states the pundits could code as “blue:” Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Their sum total of Electoral College power by today’s standards would be 92 electoral votes.

Among the so-called “red states”, we find Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Alaska. Were the Republican nominee to only garner those 13 states in this year’s Electoral College, he or she would have 95 votes.

So that means that roughly 40 percent of all of the states in the Electoral College have picked the same party in every Presidential Election over the past 20 years. These states also would account for 187 Electoral College votes, which is still 83 votes shy of a tie. But is America really that divided along ideological lines that we can think of the whole country as bordering upon a color-coded schism? Or is there more to the myth of red and blue states? In my next column, I’ll probe that issue a little deeper.