Red/Blue Flip-Flop

I was looking at Presidential election results from the last 60 years on Wikipedia. Pretty interesting. I noticed they changed the colors for Republican and Democrat after 1980. I also noticed that my state, Alabama, has sent independent voters to the Electoral College quite a bit in the last 60 years... 4 out of 15 elections. At one point, we had sent 4 out of 7! Over half... that's pretty independent. However, after Reagan, we've seemed content to vote for Republicans.