Dante Chinni
Project Director
The Christian Science Monitor
Dante Chinni is the correspondent for the Monitor’s Patchwork Nation project. Based in Washington, D.C., he has been covering politics and the media for more than 10 years. He has worked as a reporter-researcher at Newsweek and a senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism. He has written for publications including The Economist, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Washington Post Magazine. A native of Detroit and a graduate of Michigan State University, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Christina, and their two children.
James G. Gimpel
Professor of government
University of Maryland
James Gimpel is a professor of government at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has been on the faculty since January 1992. His recent research and teaching interests include American politics, political geography, voting and elections, state politics, US immigration policy, and public opinion. In 2004, he co-authored the book “Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics.” He is also the editor of American Politics Research, a scholarly journal focusing on the empirical study of American political behavior and institutions. Dr. Gimpel holds a PhD from the University of Chicago.
About the Patchwork Nation project
The United States is a vast, diverse place – more than 300 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles. Yet our understanding of its complexities is limited. We think of demographic slices or broad regions, or we fall back on the overused, oversimplified ideas of red and blue America.
Patchwork Nation, funded by the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic organization based in Miami, is designed to help us get past those views and understand how different communities and cultures within the US experience different realities – and shape the whole.
As America enters a period of great uncertainty – with a new president, a stumbling economy, rising foreign financial powers, energy challenges, and an unstable world – it’s never been so important and so difficult to understand the United States. That’s what Patchwork Nation is about.
We’ve identified 12 types of places across the US, which are distinct voter communities. They are:
- Boom Towns - growing and diversifying
- Campus and Careers - young and collegiate
- Emptying Nests - having retirees and baby boomers
- Evangelical Epicenters - culturally conservative
- Immigration Nation - heavily Hispanic
- Industrial Metropolis - big-city
- Military Bastions - bordering or encompassing bases for the armed forces
- Minority Central - heavily African-American
- Monied 'Burbs - wealthy and educated
- Mormon Outposts - many LDS adherents
- Service Worker Centers - small-town
- Tractor Country - rural and agricultural
We’ve also pinpointed specific communities that represent each type of place. For example, Sioux Center, Iowa, typifies “Tractor Country.”
This site is based on evidence that people’s voting patterns are at least partly informed by where they live. People of the same race and age and family situation may vote differently depending on whom they connect with and what they see on their streets and in their local news. In some areas, people live for NASCAR; in others, residents like opera. Some towns open for business early, and some stay up late. Some cities see Sunday mornings as church time; others see it as $30 brunch time or more work time. And Starbucks and Wal-Mart aren’t everywhere ... yet.
To make sure our analysis is solid, Patchwork Nation relies on Prof. James Gimpel, an expert in political geography at the University of Maryland in College Park. He has analyzed piles of census and consumer data – on race, employment, religion, household spending, and more – to identify these different community types across America. He’s mapped them county by county, and his findings are shown in the US map on the home page of this site.
The data determining the counties in each community type are available to anyone on this site (see the methodology page). We have invited other news organizations, groups, and individuals to conduct their own analyses with the information.
There could have been more community types. Three hundred million people can generate hundreds of groupings. We settled on 12 types that represent enough variances and are still easy for readers to follow.
With data analysis and straight reporting, we use our communities and community types to report on America’s politics, socioeconomics, and cultures. To help give us a ground-level sense of the issues, we’ve enlisted the help of local bloggers in each place.
As a site visitor, you can see which community type your county falls into and take a quiz to see how well you fit in. You can also post comments.
Please check back daily for blog updates by Patchwork Nation staffers and our local community contributors as the US embarks on what looks to be an era of dramatic change.
