For the 2008 election, the Christian Science Monitor has unveiled its “Patchwork Nation” project — which has classified each county in the United States as one of eleven different types of “communities.” These range from “Boom Towns” to “Evangelical Epicenters” to “Monied ‘Burbs.”

The CSM has also identified one “representative community” for each of the eleven types (Nixa, MO, for example, is the representative for “Evangelical Epicenters”), and has created a blog to follow the course of the election campaign in each.

But it’s not just an “either-or” classification – each ”community page” contains a separate map showing (via shading) how strongly each county in the U.S. “represents” that community type.

It’s a really novel idea for tracking the trajectory of the presidential campaign in the different parts of the U.S., as opposed to simply relying on the traditional “red-blue” formulation.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Patchwork Nation project so far is its analysis of campaign stops made by each of the candidates. In addition to a report on their blog comparing McCain vs. Obama’s campaign stops since February, the site also displays the data graphically, utilizing color-coded bars to show where the candidates have been focusing their attention.

In their latest report, the Patchwork Nation project has found that since May 22nd, Obama has made more visits to different types of places, whereas John McCain has been beating Obama in terms of overall number of campaign stops. (I created the following graphic by using the interactive drop-down menus on the CSM website): 

In any case, this is definitely a site that I’m going to keep bookmarked for the rest of this campaign season. I advise any fellow political junkies to do the same.