What states do you consider to be part of the Midwest?

i guess when i think of Midwest what i'm really thinking of is Upper Midwest: eastern bits of the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, maybe Iowa and northern Illinois (really just Chicagoland)

This is pretty much how I see it but only because I grew up in Michigan and basically everyone I know is there, in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Chicago area. Iowa, southern Illinois, the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska - that's all like great plains or farmland and is of no concern to me. Ohio is a black hole that I know nothing about but a lot of people I know hate it. Missouri is definitely the south.

So basically if you aren't touching Lakes Superior, Michigan, or Huron GTFO.

see "great plains or farmland" pretty much equates to Midwest for me. If you're far from a coast, there's no mountains for hundreds of miles, it gets hot n humid in summer and pretty damn cold in winter, you're in Midwest.

Ohio is the heart of it all.

you've got a friend in non-midwestern pennsylvania

Granny Dainger otm. As someone who grew up in Chicago and took yearly car trips to Omaha, I consider both -- and everything in between -- to be equally midwest.

People have really strong feelings about this.

The US Census Bureau has an official answer to this, right?

(It seems more or less in line with what I thought, although I wasn't sure about KS and MO.)

https://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/2019/08/midwest_metros_map_hero/940.png

We surveyed more than 12,000 people (and counting) about the most contentious border question in the U.S. to reveal the true geography of America’s midsection.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/08/where-is-the-midwest-map-geography-great-lakes-rust-belt/597082

truth

there would be more green parts in nebraska but they don't have computers in that part of nebraska

wanna know what these people in amarillo and memphis and providence are thinking

I grew up in Southern Illinois. I'm a Midwest purest = OH, IN, MI, IN, IL, WI, MN, IA, MO.

If cincinatti is in the midwest, all of kentucky must be in.

nope, too far south

outside the ❤️

back to the core, the heart states. echo and the bunnymen

I feel like once you’re north of the twin cities a ways, Minnesota becomes something else. If you can see a moose, you’re not really in the midwest anymore maybe

eastern Nebraska definitely midwest, once you get past the Omaha/Lincoln corridor it turns into a plains state eventually

^ watch carefully as this deceptively mild-mannered hawkeye attempts to lock down a spurious authority to exclude his bemidjian compatriots from the promised land

i'm not saying it's not part of the midwest, at all, but my understanding of the upper peninsula is that it might actually be part of another world

I would throw Oklahoma into the midwest and maybe North Texas. They both have more in common with that than the south or southwest.

no big 10, no credibility

People, plains states are not the Midwest, they are a whole other thing.

Also, just because some cross border inbredness occurs in areas like Southern Illinois-Southern Indiana-Western Kentucky (or Southern OH/Northern KY) doesn't mean Western Kentucky is the Midwest, anymore than the fact that Eastern Kentucky is Appalachia transforms Indiana into Appalachia by virtue of their shared border.

I feel like a 250 mile radius surrounding the sears tower is the midwest.

Or maybe it is an ellipse with foci at the longitude of chicago and east chicago

*longitudes

thank you for not suggesting a radius around touchdown jesus

I grew up in the upper peninsula and it is definitely the Midwest but also indeed another world; northern Wisconsin and Minnesota are kind of in this realm too but the UP feels much more like Alaska or Canada in a lot of ways due to the isolation from the bulk of the states population. That map seems right to me with “Great Lakes” and “rust belt” and “great plains” being three distinct sub-regions.

The thing about eastern vs western Dakotas feels true to me also - I drove from MI to WA a lot and somewhere in the western third of the state it became “the west”.

Also looking at that made me realize I always think of KS, NE, IL, and IA as the Midwest but never Missouri for some arbitrary reason. I’ve never been to Missouri though.

Like Western NY has more in common with Northern OH than NYC, but now we are going to say that NY is in the Midwest? No.

joygoat, this whole general thang has a lot to do with it i think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Compromise

grew up in western NY state which I thought of even as a kid as part of the midwest

i don't want to discount your lived experience out of hand, but also you are a literal madman

great lakes, yes. rust belt, yes. some shit about the erie canal, yes. midwest tho? c'mon

how many pronunciations of 'bagel' and 'Mario' can one midwest hold?

one

https://mario-lemieux.com/wp-content/uploads/Mario-Lemieux-2-04.jpg

Also looking at that made me realize I always think of KS, NE, IL, and IA as the Midwest but never Missouri for some arbitrary reason. I’ve never been to Missouri though.

in many ways, literal and psychedelic, but also anti-psychedelic, missouri is the combination of all those states

thank you for not suggesting a radius around touchdown jesus

― mookieproof

and thank you for mentioning touchdown jesus.

For some reason I think of Missouri more as “the south” than any of the places that surround it on three sides. Or at least more south than north and nothing that is the south can be the Midwest.

Missouri is Midwestern, but not 100% Midwest.

You can't ever have owned slaves or started a catfish farm in the Midwest. They just had a machine-gun shooting governor resign over a weird S&M episode – that ain't the Midwest I know!

But they do call Coke "Pop," so that kinda tips it back to Midwest.

Sorry I wasn't here originally, but my son was born the day before this thread was started.

They just had a machine-gun shooting governor resign over a weird S&M episode

too true -- that's more of a razorbacks ball coach thing

S&M governor seems like an incredibly midwestern thing to me - is it just that it went public and he resigned instead of just having a sex dungeon until he died?

Like it's on brand for Texas to have a governor talk about secession but if one resigned because of that, shit would be weird.

Dallas feels like the midwest

I lived in east central kansass for a number of years and I don’t think it is midwest. It definitely sucks though!

Maybe it is a Midwestern thing to resign over that. It'd be a southern governor who' d go, yeah I tied her up, took her picture and wore blackface throughout the whole thing. What you gonna do about it?

Every month, we publish this regular report from Creighton University, and every month, my editor and I just look at each other and go, Welp...

https://i.imgur.com/J4aeRxi.png

You can't ever have owned slaves or started a catfish farm in the Midwest. They just had a machine-gun shooting governor resign over a weird S&M episode – that ain't the Midwest I know!

― pplains

excuse me are you familiar with the political career of ex-cincinnati mayor jerry springer

also, sorry about your slower economic growth

Every month, we publish this regular report from Creighton University, and every month, my editor and I just look at each other and go, Welp...

― pplains, Saturday, August 31, 2019 9:03 AM (three hours ago)

I guess ND, SD, NE, KS, and OK are the pplains states.