first published week of: 09/02/2013
The United States Census Bureau has a clear definition of the Midwest: the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. But this doesn’t capture certain subtleties, such as cultural similarities. For example, should Buffalo (my hometown) be grouped into the Midwest rather than the Northeast, given its Rust Belt nature and use of the word “pop” rather than “soda”?
Rather than argue about this, we can take a massive survey. And this is what the firm Sasaki Associates did (you can take the survey here). In addition to asking users to draw their borders of the Midwest, they also asked demographic questions such as where they are from and what fraction they have lived, and you can see how differences in background change the Midwest borders. The results can be played with here, and here is a sample results map:
For more on this, The Atlantic Cities had a writeup last month about this.
A similar kind of map was made by Bill Rankin by aggregating the opinions of 100 organizations, rather than asking individuals and found this result: continued…