this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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This is actually one of the best maps on here in a while. If you know the US discourse, you can clearly read the stereotypes, political bubbles and straight-up ignorance of the various different people that were surveyed.
Illinois gets dinged because of racist narrative around Chicago. Montana does better than the rest of the midwest because it's romaticised. The people who hate California are a different bunch than the ones who hate Illinois or, for the most part, Alabama. NJ is mainly known from jokes at their expense by media-powerhouse New York. Few people know enough about South Dakota to care. DC just absorbs opinions of the feds.
I don't get the love-on for North Carolina and Pennsylvania, I guess.
People like the outer banks and It's Always Sunny. Midwesterners also HATE Chicago/Illinois since that's the biggest city in the area.
My biggest ahock is that Texas polls so high. Most people who don't live there absolutely despise Texas in my experience.
What about the Twin Cities? They're also a major center, and in a "more" midwestern area in some sense, although Chicago is probably bigger.
Not sure about Pennsylvania, but I think North Carolina is rated so favorably because conservatives like it because it's part of the South, and liberals like it because it sucks less than most of the rest of the South due to the Research Triangle. (Georgia gets a similar boost because of Atlanta, but lesser because it gets extra hate from conservatives because of civil rights / Black culture.)
So, folks, are we just gonna gloss over this guy calling Montana "Midwest?"
Is it not? What would you call it? It doesn't even end at the Canadian border, really, although we start calling it "prairies" to be distinct.
Source: Live here, have seen that border.
In the US, the "Midwest" means the area from Ohio to the Dakotas (and with a southern limit along the Ohio river and southern border of Missouri and Kansas).
Montana is full-blown "West" (or sometimes "Mountain West" or a member of the "Mountain States," if you want to distinguish it from the "West Coast" or "Pacific Northwest.")
If you can grow wheat there, it's the prairie. Therefore the Midwest. Just how the eastern parts of Colorado are the furthest west parts of the mid west. Unless you want to exclude the prairie states entirely from the mid west, which i wouldn't do.
That has never been the definition of the Midwest. If you want to go by the census definition, you are wrong.
If you approach if from a cultural or demographic standpoint, you are still wrong.
I would argue that the Midwest ends at the banks of the Mississippi river and maybe carries halfway into the western states. Past that it is a whole nother place.
Montana is mountain west or west. Always has been.
I've never seen or heard Montana called Midwest. It's more Rockies or Northwest. Eastern half could be considered Great Plains-ish.
Not sure on Pennsylvania. But for North Carolina, my guess would be the research triangle helping boost it?
Probably more OBX and the mountains. The "research triangle" is boring af and is just cookie cutter neighborhoods and chain restaurants
The Pennsylvania part is really mystifying. Is it riding on the popularity of cheese steaks?
What are the chances Washington gets dinged for having the same name as DC?
To give them some credit, Americans know basic facts about their own geography, at least. Washington ends up with roughly the same favourability as Oregon here, and the two states do seem awfully similar.
Now, knowing that DC is actually full of ordinary, mostly black people, or that Montana isn't very different from North Dakota? Maybe not. That's beyond just map facts.
Seattle and Portland do make up the PNW hippie culture, which I'm sure plenty of respondents find unfavorable