As a native of Cleveland, where the culture of the Western Reserve (northeast Ohio) derives directly from Connecticut, and lots of small towns in the woods like Chagrin Falls have the look and feel of New England, I have difficulty thinking of my native land as Midwest. Maybe western Ohio, but no way is Cleveland Midwestern.
I went to college in St. Louis and dated someone at Mizzou in Columbia, and I have to say Missouri is totally a no-brainer for Midwestern status. To the people in St. Louis, it certainly is.
Pennsylvania? You have to be kidding. Philadelphia is Atlantic Seaboard. Pittsburgh is similar to Cleveland in many ways, minus the lake and the New England influence. Pittsburgh, up on the Allegheny Plateau, is actually the biggest metropolis of Appalachia. The westernmost edge of the Allegheny Plateau is literally the city limits of Cleveland, on Cedar Hill. Cleveland proper is down on the narrow lacustrine plain, with its eastern suburbs (the Heights) up on the plateau. I think of both Pittsburgh and Cleveland as Inland North, which is more or less the Great Lakes, most of which is Midwest, but not all. The west half of New York State is also of the Great Lakes, but nobody’s ever going to call that Midwest.
West Virginia is doomed to be “none of the above.” In addition to the South and the Rust Belt and Appalachia, the easternmost part of WV is now in the suburban orbit of Washington, DC. All one can say of WV is that it’s sui generis.
Minnesota is also a no-brainer: Bob Dylan sang “The country I come from is called the Midwest.” I counted Kansas and Nebraska as Midwest, since they’re all about the big grain combines. But South Dakota is cowboys & Indians to me, and North Dakota might as well be in Canada for all anyone can tell the difference.
So what? Southern Missouri is indistinguishable from the South. Border areas of states often resemble a neighboring region. Border areas are in themselves insufficient for categorization.
Not in my experience. I’ve asked my friends and colleagues (especially a couple people who are actually from the midwest) who live in places like Wichita, and they laughed when I asked them if they thought they were still in the midwest. Laughed.
I couldn’t care less. But it’s really obvious to all except for a few deniers (who want to dream that they live in Michigan or Minnesota) Kansas is not midwestern and neither is Oklahoma or Nebraska.
If I were to offer a more accurate categorization for those states, it would be something like wanna-be Texas.
So what if a few suburbs are similar? Suburbs are similar everywhere, from Seattle to Long Island. Big deal.
Culturally, voting habits, culinarily: those states are clearly not midwest.
Yeah, so kind of how I think of it. I agree that Ohio straddles the Midwest, but it’s interesting to see that it’s only one vote behind Wisconsin in this poll right now (109 vs 110) in being considered “Midwestern.” I mean, how is Wisconsin not the Midwest? I don’t have that much insight into Cleveland culture, but the Clevelanders I’ve known have some affinity with urban Midwest, like Detroit or Chicago (even the accents are similar.) I think I lop that along with Buffalo into a general “Rust Belt” kind of designation, or maybe a general Great Lakes region thing. I dunno. I feel a lot of similarities among these cities.
You really seem incapable of looking at different regions of any particular state as if they might possibly belong to different categorical areas, aren’t you? Why can’t “the Midwest” extend across most of Missouri, and exclude the very Southern areas? Hell - Indiana is near the top of the poll, but you can make pretty strong cases that the Evansville area and Louisville suburbs wouldn’t consider themselves “the Midwest”.
Yeah, I haven’t made any appeal for the Wichita area to be considered Midwest. Again, a quarter of the state identifies as Midwestern. What possible motivation does anyone have to force this arbitrary line to be drawn at the state line?
“Culinarily”? Oh lord. If you want to make “culinarily” a litmus, you’ve eliminated Minnesota with their Peppermint Bon Bon (and let’s not get started on “Duck Duck Grey Duck”). “Culturally”, Wisconsin and Minnesota are fairly different than any of the other states on the list. The two states you seem enamored with, Minnesota and Michigan, aren’t really all that similar, compared to their respective neighbors. It’s almost like this entire category is pretty arbitrary and subjective - one should likely just defer to how the people themselves choose to label themselves.
It’s required for political analysis when races follow state lines. I suspect this is why Nate Silver struggled with it and posed it as a question. If you’re breaking down governor, senator, or presidential elections by region, you have to follow state lines because the elections follow state lines.
A breakdown of any of those races by region would be meaningless, Kansas or no Kansas. Silver breaks elections down by precinct, not by which states say “y’all” instead of “you all”.
Calling Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas “Plain States” would be a much better predictive category for them than “Midwest,” since the latter would be misleading in terms of expectations of what you would actually find regarding voting patterns, culinary preferences (yes, almost every state has something unique in terms of food, but regional commonalities as well, especially the Midwest), culture, politics, and, I forgot to add, accent.
I think the I-79, I-70, I-29 perimeter is a pretty good definition. Cities on that border are: Erie, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Indianapolis, St Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and Sioux Fall.
The Census Bureau includes Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin, and officially designates it as the North Central region.
As a native Clevelander, I agree with this, 100%. Cleveland culturally/historically is essentially the westernmost New England City. Columbus is distinctly Midwestern, and Cincinnati might as well be a riverboat city on the shores of the southern Mississippi river. Anyone who classifies the entire state of Ohio as Midwestern clearly has little knowledge of the history of the state. While all of the rust-belt cities share many similarities, the rise and fall of heavy industry is a relatively recent and short period of their histories.
