There’s no “The” in Ohio, either. But that doesn’t stop them from calling their state university that.
Once again, nobody calls it that except for official statements from the university administration.
Suck it, Indiana! With your meager 97.94% 
I’m from Missouri, too, and you gotta show me. Bootheelers and some rural areas pronounce it Mi-zu-rah; KC, St. Louie and more metro areas say Mi-zoo-ree, and never the twain shall meet.
Part of the Midwest? You bet your ass.
I agree with this. You could take your rural Wisconsin farmer grandfather to a county fair in Eastern Nebraska or Kansas and he’d be right at home. He’d be comfortable with all the people wearing Red Wing work boots and overalls, the dairy cattle, the John Deere dealers showing off their farm equipment, etc. But take him to North Platte or Dodge City and he’d be completely out of place with everyone wearing cowboy boots, the sheep and beef cattle, the rodeos, and the equipment dealers displaying four wheelers with their attachments of post hole diggers and bush hogs.
I voted for all of the no brainers and barely qualifies. In the second group, only part of the state is Midwestern.
missred, a native Hoosier
What kind of hoosier? 
There’s an Indiana Hoosier, and there’s a Missouri/Illinois Hoosier. Two different meanings.
Lamar Mundane and Greasy Jack got it exactly right.
I forgot to choose Wisconsin… ugh. Otherwise I agree with all the most popular answers. I never considered Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas to be Midwest (I always called them Great Plains states). Missouri was a tough one for me but I ultimately ended up choosing it. Definitely not Kentucky or Tennessee (those are South). Pennsylvania had me stumped for a while because no one really considers it part of the Northeast/New England, and it’s also not part of the South. I ultimately did not choose it but I don’t know what it belongs to.
Down goes Illinois!
Was it forgetfullness? Spite? Explain yourself.
Seven seconds in.
The Greater Columbus Convention and Visitors Bureau is careful to capitalize The.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution parrots the party line.
Transfer student uses the The word before he even gets on campus.
Even the branch campus at Marion gets the full treatment.
So, what, every city with suburbs and a cold winter/hot summer climate in the US from Spokane to Denver to Syracuse is midwest? Yeah, right.
Suburbs of cities are the least cultural distinct places in America. Generalizing from them to come up with regional categories is very silly.
Here’s a map of prairie land:File:Map of the grassland ecoregions of the United States.jpg - Wikipedia
To me, the Midwest is prairie land, Lincoln logs, Little House on the Prairie, and the land of Oz. I consider Nebraska to be the center of the Midwest, and have always thought of the Midwest of prairie land country. I’m in a considerably minority opinion including Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado as Midwest although their most populace territories are prairie land. I checked Ohio as Midwest, but after viewing this map, I’ll omit Ohio. I have to include Indiana because it has some prairie land and because I can’t think of Hoosier country as anything other than Midwest.
So what are we left with? You’re the one that made the nonsensical statement that “Kansans by and large have relatively little in common with people from Minnesota or Michigan” - and I pointed out that an extremely significant amount of them do, in fact, have a lot in common with them. Eastern Kansas is indistinguishable from much of the Midwest in both demographic and geographic details, it is contiguous with that region, and its population self-identifies as midwestern. But feel free to chop off western Kansas if it bothers you so much in your quest to pinpoint the exact borders of the midwest.
I picked the “No Brainers” plus Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri. I never thought of North and South Dakota as Midwest, although I suppose if I put Nebraska and Kansas in there, I should consider them.
Maybe the person is from Cairo, which is as Southern as any Delta town like Rosedale, Greenville, Helena, or Vicksburg.
Yeah, thinking about it, I probably should lop Nebraska, Kansas, North and South Dakota simply into “Plains States.” Kansas and Nebraska, though, somehow feel a bit “Midwestern” to me in a way that North and South Dakota don’t. Maybe it’s the relative flatness and the farming? And now with Nebraska in the Big Ten, that kind of reinforces my feeling of Nebraska in the Midwest (although I don’t really consider U Penn, another late Big Ten addition, to be Midwestern.)
I guess to be consistent, I should either add N. and S. Dakota (which is how the US Census defines it), or remove Nebraska and Kansas from my definition.
Ohio is also kind of an odd one. I definitely put it in the Midwest, but I feel it has three distinct geographical cultures to it: Midwest, Eastern, and Southern, depending on where you are in the state.
U Penn is in the Ivy League.
Penn State is in the Big Ten.
:smack: I knew that, really I did (especially since I graduated from a Big Ten school.) Morning brain fart. Need coffee to stimulate neural pathways.
Ha. I actually think school conferences is one of the reasons some people are opposed to thinking of Kansas and Nebraska as the Midwest. Back when the Big Ten was just 10 schools, it was easy to point to those 7 states and say “that’s the Midwest”, and lump the Big 6/8 into some “other” category, usually saying they’re the “Great Plains (plus Colorado)”. That seems pretty limited thinking, IMO.