Tuesday is election day in Virginia (and a bunch of other states too but Virginia is the only race everyone in the media is really keeping a close eye on because nobody cares about New Jersey or a handful of special US House elections for safe Republican or Democrat districts). Republicans confidently guaranteed victory by Republican Glenn Youngkin while Democrats wearily said it will be tight but former Governor Terry McAuliffe will probably be able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Republicans also hedged against a possible defeat with their hilarious “voter fraud” routine in which it is impossible for their candidate to lose without malfeasance by Democrats.

Election analysts, men (and some women) who are paid by media outlets to make predictions based on public opinion polls, say this is a tight one, and either Youngkin or McAuliffe could win based on which candidate receives the larger quantity of ballots marked by voters with the bubble or checkbox filled in next to their names. Other pundits said the turnout is key, that if one candidate’s supporters leave their homes and submit a ballot – thus “turn out” – then he will prevail over his opponent in the contest. Still others say the “suburbs” are where this election will be won because the rural areas of Virginia will vote for the Republican while the urban areas will vote for the Democrat. Many have even assigned a helpful color-coded visual heuristic to illustrate this assessment in which the urban areas are colored blue, rural areas red, and suburban areas – localities bearing characteristics common to both urban and rural areas – purple.

The purple is particularly intuitive as, on the visual spectrum that particular color is a blend of the two primary colors red and blue, providing a neat representation of the “mixture” of rural and urban that many associate with real suburbs. Most scientific contexts tend to use “violet” however as it is considered a more exacting term to distinguish its position on the color spectrum as opposed to the more colloquial purple. However most laypersons associate “violet” with a species of flowering plant common to North America. Why the dual usage of the word is not widely accepted is unknown, particularly in light of the co-existence of a color orange and a fruit also called an orange.