I don’t have “hate” for any region. Take any 100-mile chunk of the US and you will find professors, scientists, drug addicts, retirees, small business owners, farmers, soccer moms, prisoners, and lots of other types of people. As soon as you start classifying a large area or diverse group of people as “bad” then you’re wrong.
Impresses me as someone who hasn’t done a lot of driving thru the Plains/SW! ;).
Not saying I “hate” any region, but you can drive well over 100 miles in some areas w/o encountering many people at al - not to mention much diversity.
Set foot outside of Portland, OR or Salem and you’ll meet people that literally hate you for living there. Oregon is largely farmland and there is a lot of ill feeling towards those of us living in the cities. They’re happy enough to take our money, but otherwise want little to do with us. I’ve run into some fairly aggressive people east of here, including at the Pendleton Roundup, which is why I’ve never gone back. It’s a broad brush to paint with, I know, but in some areas the anger is palpable.
Speaking as a Canadian, personally, I like Cleveland a lot, and have been many times over the years. It’s about five hours down the highway from Toronto. A great history of music (not to mention the Rock Hall, no matter how corny and corporate it is), beautiful deco architecture, a terrific comic con, and generally in my experience, really friendly residents. I have a bunch of friends in the area in CLE, and COVID cancelling Wizard World this year was a real drag as I didn’t get to cross the border and see my Ohioan friends in March like I usually do. I can’t speak for going further south in the state, and I can only imagine that it’s like other midwestern states with their city/country split (as I once read Pennsylvania described: you’ve got Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and in between is Alabama), but even Akron, which produced Devo, has gotta have something going on I can appreciate.
… and that’s just ol’ Mabel down the block.
(I live on a street full of retired profs who are brilliant but really quirky… there’s one granny/Chem PhD/entrepreneur who I’d bet did jail time… and grew a ton of weed… in the '60s)
Have you read The Nine Nations of North America? Geographer named Joel Garreau made this exact point - the historic divisions of the country, like Midwest, South, Northwest – were outdated. He noted that a city like Topeka, Kansas has more in common with, say, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, than it does with Cleveland or Chicago.
The South comes in for bashing because of our history, and that damned flag. But I also suspect that it’s because our wackos are a lot more flamboyant than the Midwestern varieties. I don’t think Ohio has ever produced a Marjorie Taylor Greene or Huey Long or Lester Maddox.
I do note that you’re guilty of the same overgeneralization about which you complained. I see this a lot from people on this board; they don’t see a difference between Dothan, Alabama, where 70.4% voted for Trump in 2020, in a state with no Democrats in any statewide office, and Atlanta, which went for Biden 72.6%, that has never had a Republican mayor or Congressperson, and that elected its first black mayor in 1973, more than a decade before Chicago or New York, in a state that very nearly voted in the first black female governor, and now has two Democratic senators, one African-American and one Jewish.
I am really fucking sick of people talking about my home of 30 years as though it were East Klanville, Mississippi. We’re the hometown of Martin Luther King Jr and three of the most prestigious HBCUs in the country, motherfuckers!
And Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders!
Wisconsin, at least, has produced Joe McCarthy, who had his own unique brand of toxic, paranoid rabble-rousing.
We’ve got Jim Jordan. Not that I’m proud of that.
My good friend once pointed out that Wisconsin like to occasionally redefine the term “cannibalistic serial killer”.
Thankfully, neither Ed Gein nor Jeffrey Dahmer held political office. 
Just remember, Dahmer was born in Ohio and committed his first murder there, before moving to Wisconsin.
Both states must be very proud.
I think your question shows that this is changing. The midwest, ‘heartland of America’, used to define wholesomeness – it was thought of as a region filled with hardworking, churchgoing, decent, friendly people. Now the term represents the worst of Trumpism – hateful, bigoted hypocrites waving the flag while trampling the Constitution, waving the bible while applauding child torture, calling women ma’am while grabbing their pussy, etc.
… and it shouldn’t, at least not compared to the south, which is way worse by any measure.
But the south has always been this way, and everyone knows it. But who ever expected to see crowds of squeaky-clean Iowans screaming hate at Trump rallies. Just blows the image to shreds. It was always phony, but now it’s publicly so.
Ditto Michiganders. I moved here recently, and nearly everyone is shocked and sometimes even appalled that I chose to do so.
“Why would you move … here … ?” is a question I get distressingly often.
I grew up in Ohio and I think of it as being the compromise state. Except for Virginia, more U.S. Presidents were born in Ohio than any other state, and Virginia is more because five of the first nine Presidents were born in Virginia. Picking someone from Ohio is the way of saying, “Well, we can’t pick someone from this area or this one or this one or . . . oh, well, let’s just pick someone from Ohio as a compromise.” Ohio is a mess of different political views. Over the past few Presidential elections, it has never been heavily for one or another of the candidates, just slightly for one more than the other. If you have never spent a lot of time in Ohio, your view of it is probably based on what one small area was like (or more probably, what one family was like).
My cousin is a doctor and was assigned to a rural area in Nebraska to practice (apparently there was a shortage of doctors there and foreign qualified doctors were given some preference in licensure if they were to go practice in an underserved area for a number of years, this is back 25-30 years ago. He is an Indian American.
Anyway, he gets caught in a snowstorm and gets stuck on a semirural road, houses with large lots and LONG driveways. A couple comes out and helps him move his car out of the roadway and tells him to come into the house because no help will come for hours, nor will the snow be plowed before nightfall.
So he goes in and they are kind as anything. They go on about how they love Indian food and culture etc. Then they start contrasting how good Indian immigrants are to how bad Blacks, Mexicans and those other Indians (i.e. Native Americans) are. Those people are just looking for a handout, didn’t contribute to the economy, were responsible for their own miserable state, etc.
When I lived in Kansas City and traveled to “outer” Kansas and Oklahoma a lot, I saw a lot of this same kind of thing from co-workers, clients and tennis players all the time. Dunno if they really bought into the model minority crap or were talking shit about Asian-Americans as soon as our backs were turned.
I must object.
The south is in no way comparable to the Midwestern Wasteland. We have a range of cultural color unmatched in the rest of the continent. From the unfounded arrogance of Texans to the pockets of gothic horror like New Orleans or Charleston, to the festering tRumpism of Florida, to the fulminating ignorance of, say, Arkansas- we are a rule unto ourselves. But at least we have an interesting variety of pathology to study. I would not live anywhere else!
Though I live in suburban Chicago, I grew up in Wisconsin, and still insist that I am from Wisconsin. I follow a subreddit about Wisconsin, and I regularly see posts there which start out with something like, “So, we’re a lesbian liberal couple, and we’re moving to [insert name of mid-sized Wisconsin city]. I keep hearing that Wisconsin is Trumpland, but is there any hope for us having any sort of social life there?”