John Chancellor

You might remember John Chancellor as the guy who hosted the NBC Nightly News before Tom Brokaw, or perhaps as the host of the Today Show before Barbara Walters. No? Well, certainly you must remember that it was John Chancellor who, during the 1976 election between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, first came up with the idea of Red States and Blue States. That's right, it was John Chancellor who first thought of the idea of coloring states on a map to indicate whether they were won by the Democrats or Republicans. Except, in 1976, Chancellor told his audience that the red states were Democratic and the blue states were Republican. That got turned around after Democrats complained that they didn't want to be thought of as Communists.