Patchwork Nation

So I'm up late again, flipping between CNN and MSNBC for election coverage (Obama picked up Oregon and Clinton won Kentucky ... no surprise there) and browsing websites during commercials and surrogate babble, and just as I'm about to give up for the night I stumble onto this. Of all the demographic analysis and map coloring that I've seen over the past few months, this has to be the most interesting—by far.

The Christian Science Monitor's Patchwork Nation divides communities into one of eleven groups:

Boom Towns (brown)



Evangelical Epicenters (yellow)



Military Bastions (purple)



Service Worker Centers (red)



Campus & Careers (dark green)



Immigration Nation (cyan)



Minority Central (orange)



Tractor Country (pink)



Emptying Nests (light green)



Industrial Metopolis (gray)



Monied 'Burbs (peach)



The combined result looks something like this: