The counties that fall into Patchwork Nation’s Service Worker Centers category are full of small towns where people who live nearby come to shop, eat and generally do business. Many are tourist hubs. These are money trading centers.

There are about 12 million people living in the 278 counties of America’s Service Worker Center counties. The median household income here sits below the national average, as does the number of people who graduated from college. The unemployment figures are a good 1.5 points higher than the national average, and those that do have jobs are probably working for local restaurants and retailers or for local municipalities – more than half the people who live in these places hold service or government jobs.

And many people here struggle. These are places where the economy is a dominant issue in 2008.

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» Listen to Dante talk about Service Worker Centers on The Takeaway

A lot of people here are living on the margins and just getting by. So, the rising price of gas has had an especially big impact on the people in these semi-rural places who drive further to get around. And the money to pay for transportation is coming from a smaller income base. When bad news on Wall Street hits, people living in Service Worker Centers don’t run to look at their stock portfolios or even their 401(k)s. The effects they feel are delayed, the trickle-down impacts of the broader economic hit, and the biggest immediate impact can be a sense of dread.

Going into 2008 these places looked like battlegrounds, and they still do. Set against those economic concerns are more conservative social views. Service Worker Centers are overwhelmingly white and the working-class attitudes that prevail in many of these places can lead them to vote Republican. President Bush won these counties narrowly in 2004.
– Dante Chinni

Read more about the Patchwork Nation communities at The Takeaway’s election Web site, vote2008.thetakeaway.org »