Take a Visit To Patchwork Nation

Jon Margolis [1], former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 [2]," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

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The Republicans of the Evangelical Epicenters still have their doubts about John McCain. Immigration is a big issue in Tractor Country, even where there aren’t many immigrants. In Service Workers Center, a typical voter complains that the country is “in a war and not having enough money for anything else.”

Those locations will not be found in a standard atlas. They are three of the 11 regions of Patchwork Nation [3], the Christian Science Monitor’s new and intriguing gimmick for covering the presidential campaign.

“Gimmick” here is not intended as a pejorative. Good for the Monitor for finding an alternative to campaign coverage dominated by the latest polls, the latest fund-raising and the latest flappette over who said what, when, about whom.  And good for the Knight Foundation for financing it. “Patchwork Nation,” online every weekday and in print once a week, gives its readers political snapshots from representative communities around the country.

The concept is not new. It’s a variation of target marketing, and even Dante Chinni, the 39-year-old journalist who got the idea, acknowledges that Patchwork Nation is a relatively primitive version because it goes to only the county level, not the smaller census tracts used by sophisticated “micro-targeting.”

Patchwork Nation isn’t trying to sell anything, but Chinni, who has worked for Newsweek and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said the connection between commerce and politics helped inspire the idea.

“I was trying to think about different ways to cover campaigns,” he said. “And I started thinking about media consumption.”

He was also thinking about the country, how it wasn’t all the same, how dividing it simply into Red States and Blue States was inadequate.

One thought, as it will, led to another, and one phone call to another, and eventually Chinni hooked up with James Gimpel, a professor of government at the University of Maryland in College Park and the author of the 2004 book “Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics.” A few months ago, Chinni recalled, Gimpel said, “I can do this for you with county data.”

Most of the data came from the Census Bureau, but Gimpel had to go elsewhere for statistics on religious affiliation, which the bureau does not compile. After sifting through figures on race, religion, household income, poverty rates, age distribution and education levels, they came up with 11 representative types of community, picked one county to represent each type, and then found the most representative town in the county. The town was “the best match,” Chinni said, not necessarily the biggest town or the county seat.

There’s a big-city “Industrial Metropolis” (Philadelphia) and a farm town in “Tractor Country “(Sioux Center, Iowa). There’s a “Boom Town” (Eagle, Colo.) and an “Emptying Nest” town (Clermont, Fla.). There’s an “Immigrant Nation” city (El Mirage, Ariz.), a “Military Bastion” (Hopkinsville, Ky.). Areas with heavy concentrations of Evangelical Christians are in the “Evangelical Epicenters” represented in the project by Nixa, Mo. Rich suburbs are “Monied Burbs” (Los Alamos, N.M.). Slightly less rich but younger and perhaps more educated folks are in “Campus and Careers” counties (Ann Arbor, Mich.). Less affluent and older people live in “Service Worker Centers” (Lincoln City, Ore), and the least affluent dominate “Minority Central” areas such as Baton Rouge.

One can quarrel about how representative this list really is. Three locations in the Rocky Mountain West, only one in the Northeast and none at all in California don’t add up to geographic balance. But it does seem to be a pretty good cross-section of American life. Chinni and Gimpel are not claiming to have a precisely representative random sample of the electorate. What they may have come up with is a helpful plan for illustrating the divisions among the electorate.

In fact, Patchwork Nation rests on an assumption that some demographers and pollsters might resist – that place matters. To Chinni and Gimpel, a voter is not merely a composite of his or her personal demographics: race, religion, age, income, education and the like. Instead, that voter is a composite of his or her personal demographics in a specific place, and the place has its impact.

“The one thing we really try to emphasize is these are not people; these are communities,” Chinni said. “You can be the most rightwing Republican in the country, and you live in Manhattan. You still live in specific kind of community, and that plays a role in how you perceive the election. The media you see and read. What you see on the street every day. All those issues shape the way the community votes.”

Like so many Web sites, Patchwork Nation has its interactive feature. Chinni and Gimpel did not just designate the 11 areas they are writing about. They did the whole country. Your county is on there, too. Just go to the Web site, (csmonitor.com/patchworknation) , enter your zip code in the appropriate slot and find out how your county is characterized.

I did and immediately revealed a flaw in the structure. Orleans County, Vt., where I live, was designated “Campus and Careers,” just like Ann Arbor.

They had to be kidding. There is one tiny college (Sterling College, about 100 students) in this corner of northeastern Vermont. The median age is well above average, and the (relatively few) young people who stay around after they graduate are delighted just to get a job. Forget careers.

There are similarities. The median income and poverty rates are comparable, and so is the religious composition – not many evangelicals in either place. The problem is that statistical comparability does not necessarily prove political similarity. John Kerry did carry Orleans County in 2004, but not by nearly as much as he swept Washtenaw County, Mich. Ann Arbor votes Democratic straight down the ticket. The local officials up my way are more likely to be Republicans. Nor is this the only anomaly. A reader from Santa Fe, N.M., wondered how her Democratic-voting county wound up as an “Evangelical Epicenter,” a realm, the Patchwork Nation Web site notes, that “almost certainly will be a GOP stronghold again in 2008.”

None of which invalidates Patchwork Nation. Chinni and Gimpel concede that many counties just barely fit into their designated slot. There are, after all, more than 11 kinds of community in America, and any characterization scheme runs the risk of excessive generalization.

“I don’t discount that some locations hard to classify,” Gimpel said. “Some locations seem to fit a number of categories very well.” One of the maps on the site will let you know whether your county fits solidly or just barely into its classification.

What makes Patchwork Nation more than a gimmick is that it does not rely on Gimpel’s statistical scheme. Instead, Chinni tops off the design with old-fashioned reporting. He’s been to every one of the 11 targeted communities, developed local sources and enlisted local bloggers – businesspeople, academics, office-holders – to supplement his own daily reports.

Those reports are mercifully short and to the point. Like so much political coverage, they deal with the issues, the strategies of the candidates, the odds on who will win the next primary. But though they are written in Washington, their sources are not the pollsters, consultants or strategists of the presidential campaigns. They are folks like the mayor of Nixa, Mo.; the chief operating officer of South Lake Hospital in Clermont, Fla.; the editor of the weekly newspaper in Sioux Center, Iowa.

No, these people and the others Chinni keeps talking to are no smarter than the Beltway insiders. But they are different, from the political junkies and from one another. Patchwork Nation allows Chinni and the Monitor to get back to a concept of political journalism that has been given short shrift, though not entirely abandoned, in recent years – the idea of using coverage of the campaign to cover the country, to explain it to itself in all its sometimes messy variety.

“It’s not like old ways need to be thrown out,” Chinni said. “ Candidate coverage is important. We’ve gotten to point where we have semi-psychological profiles of the candidates. That isn’t bad, either.  But there’s still a lot more diversity in America than people realize.”

No doubt. And anything that helps people realize a truth they know too little about ought to be celebrated. Looking at a hodgepodge of a country through the perspective of a Patchwork Nation might help.