This is a multiple choice poll. You can pick as many choices as you want.
Which of the following states do you consider to be part of the “Mid-West”?
Argh. I should have clicked Kansas, but I missed it. So count one more vote for Kansas.
I think I’ve posted this rant here before… but I hate the term. The Midwest (that is the middle of the Western US) should be Nevada-Utah. Darn Ohioans have been bogarting the term for a century and a half longer than they should have.
Unfortunately people have not seen the wisdom of my vision. So when I hear the term I think of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. It certainly doesn’t stretch as far as Colorado… No one here would refer to Colorado as Midwestern.
Western PA seemed to be the gateway to the mid-west, when I lived there, but I wouldn’t count it as the Midwest.
The midwest is WI, MI, IL, MN, IA, MO, IN, OH.
otherwise there’s the great plains, the mountain states, the west coast, the southern states, and the northeast.
A case can be made that MN, IA, and MO belong to the great plains.
QtM, WI resident and farm owner. (But not a farmer.)
This. Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas are part of the Great Plains. Any state that was in the old Confederacy is part of the Southeast, plus Oklahoma, Kentucky, and (for lack of any other states that would belong to Appalachia as a region) West Virginia.
Strangely enough, at the moment more people feel that Iowa and Indiana are part of the Midwest than feel that Illinois (which is right between Iowa and Indiana) is.
As QtM & RTF say. It’s Illinois & it’s immediate neighbors, plus OH & MN, but not KY.
Said another way, it’s the states bordering the Great Lakes & west of PA. Plus IA & MO which
adjoin IL.
At the time the term was coined, it was the new part of the country which had some people & wasn’t the South. It was the part you could get to without risking life & limb. And yes, western PA was then in the Midwest. In those days the Far West started at Kansas City and extended out across the trackless wastes to gosh-knows-where.
Yes, Midwest is a term we ought to consign to the ash-heap of history. Let’s just call the area the Upper Middle. Or maybe the Boring Part.
Missed MO, but got the rest.
Same here (I’m from Michigan).
I could see people including MO, ND, SD, NE and maybe KS. I’ve heard the number of states where people feel they’re part of the midwest is larger than the number of states any of them consider to be part of the midwest.
ETA: I’m most surprised by the number of votes for Oklahoma.
Live in Illinois currently, grew up in Wisconsin; I consider both to be in the Midwest.
I live in Minnesota, which I reluctantly consider to be in the upper midwest (along with the Dakotas and Wisconsin). Like Bartman, I don’t care for the term. The rest of the midwest by my reckoning consists of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri.
Colorado, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming are high plains. Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia are out east. Arkansas and Oklahoma are southern.
I’ve never thought of Michigan or Ohio as midwestern states, which seems rather strange. I always think of them as Iron Belt states. I try not to think of Indiana at all.
I agree with this. I’m in Wisconsin, too.
Basically, to me, it’s Big Ten country for the Midwest, minus PA. I barely consider MO to be the Midwest, but I think of St. Louis as a Midwestern city, so I put it in. MO is weird (to me) because it’s got some traits of the Midwest, the South, and the Great Plains, and it’s on the edge of all 3. I suppose Arkansas may suffer from this identity problem, too, maybe even more so. I don’t think of it as the South, but it’s certainly not the Midwest or the Plains.
The same, except I always exclude Missouri, geographically correct or not. As a former slave state it is always associated with the south in my mind.
Or everything in the triangle with corners at Ohio, Minnesota, and Missouri.
I’m finding the poll distribution interesting. Right now, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa are clearly ahead of everyone else, in the 41-42 vote range, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin are all in the 32-33 vote range (a separation that intrigues me - who are all these people voting for Iowa but not Minnesota, Michigan, or Wisconsin?), Missouri’s at 29 which I sort of understand.
And then you get to the Plains states. I’d have thought that Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas would be either in or out as a group in most people’s minds, but Nebraska’s currently got 28 votes, Kansas has 24, and the Dakotas have 18 each. It’s a mystery to me.
The eastern half to two thirds of those states are Midwestern. They farm, not ranch. They wear ballcaps with seed company brands on them, not stetsons. They wear lace up boots, not cowboy boots. Since most of the population of those states is in the east, I say they are Midwestern.
The Midwest is an area of the Northwest Ordinance. Every modern state that was not part of the original Northwest Ordinance merely wants to ride the coattails of those that were part of it.
Actually, I’d make the case that eastern Nebraska and eastern Kansas are part of the Midwest.
In either case, I prefer the term “real America.”
I followed a link from there to the Midwest page on wikipedia. They have a map with the US census bureau’s definition: WI, MI, IL, MN, IA, MO, IN, OH, ND, SD, NE and KS.
No Oklahoma, no Kentucky.
I’ve lived in the South and the Midwest and I consider the Midwest to start around IL. Chicago is a major midwestern city, in the eastern portion of the Midwest. I consider the midwest to end at the Rocky Mountains and/or the southwest deserts (NM and AZ are not midwestern)
The Midwest, like the South, has historic definitions but is also fluid and can vary by context. I’ve found Central IL to be very similar in terms of landscape to Iowa and Nebraska. Texas can be both Midwestern and Southern depending on context (culturally Southern, but may be Midwestern in terms of physical geography and has a more midwestern economy (e.g. cattle).
West Virginia is definitely Appalachia.