Many of these points are precisely the ones I made, however, I do smell a rat in assigning red to Republicans, if for no other reason that the liberal, Democratic-sympathetic MSM wanted to get the red "monkey off their back" and
prevent red from being associated with socialism and communism.
Think back to the 1950s when the Cincinnati major league baseball team changed their name to the Redlegs, because "Reds" in the 1950s wasn't quite the thing you'd want to call yourself.