‘Midwest’ is hard to define — but Kansans know Idaho and Pennsylvania aren’t part of it | Opinion

If everybody thinks they’re in the Midwest, is anyplace the Midwest?

That’s the question I had on Tuesday, when Middle West Review, a journal published by the University of Nebraska Press, posted the results of polling that asked Americans in 22 states whether they consider themselves Midwesterners.

As it turns out, a whole lot of people do.

More than 90% of Kansans and Missourians think of themselves as Midwesterners. No surprise there. But so do 9.4% of Pennsylvanians, who live way out east. Same for roughly a quarter of Idahoans who live all the way out west. So did more than half of Wyoming residents.

I’m no scholar, but c’mon folks: Wyoming is not the Midwest.

As it turns out, a lot of the results came as something of a surprise to the editors of Middle West Review, who worked with Emerson College Polling to conduct the survey.

“There’s also people living in Iowa that don’t consider themselves in the Midwest,” said Christopher R. Laingen, a geography professor at Eastern Illinois University who is also an associate editor for the journal. Conversely, he added, “Oklahoma really surprised me.”

No kidding. Two-thirds of Oklahomans said they live in the Midwest. As a Kansan, that result seems all but impossible to me: I’ve spent a lifetime thinking of my state as the very southwest corner of what might reasonably be called the “Midwest.”

Oklahoma? That’s something else entirely. Or so I thought. Kansas City Star Opinion Editor Yvette Walker, who just spent 17 years living in Oklahoma, thinks it’s because of the rivalry with Texas. “Anything to differentiate themselves from that state to the South,” she said.

But a lot of the responses confused me: More Missourians (95.3%) than Kansans (91.2%) think of themselves as living in the Midwest.

Maybe it’s because I was brought up on Border War lore, but I’ve always thought of Missouri as a bit more, well, a bit more oriented to the South. (That particular question was a “big debate” among the folks examining the poll results, Laingen said.) Missourians themselves clearly think otherwise.

But the fuzziness of regional identity — and particularly Midwestern identity — is longstanding. Laingen pointed to perhaps the definitive work on the topic. “The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture,” by University of Kansas geography professor James Shortridge, came out in 1989.

Shortridge kicked off the book by calling the Midwest an “amorphous region.” So these debates are nothing new.

“He’s got a couple of great maps where he asked someone from Ohio where the Midwest is, versus someone from Kansas, and the maps about those two are very different,” Laingen said. “A person from Kansas’ Midwest tends to be a lot farther west and usually doesn’t even include Ohio in the Midwest — whereas the Ohioan’s Midwest rarely goes west of Iowa.

“So kind of where you’re from informs what you think of the region or where you think the region is.”

The new polling results probably won’t settle any of these debates. But they are a whole lot of fun. Tuesday’s post by Middle West Review on the social network formerly known as Twitter drew a bunch more response than the tiny academic journal usually gets. (Sample response: “If there is a mountain that gets snow on it anywhere in your state, you are not in the Midwest.”)

And there’s more to come: The journal is making the raw polling data available so the public can crunch the numbers and share their findings.

For the record: Geographers mostly consider “the Midwest” to be a 12-state region bordered by Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas on the west and Ohio in the east. But Laingen said regional identity doesn’t always neatly conform to state borders — geography, culture and even a sense of urban versus rural identity also matter — and there are “peripheral” areas where one region can shade into another.

The Midwest really is a definable place, in other words, even if that definition can get messy in the popular imagination. But it’s also a state of mind.

“It matters in that it kind of explains your cultural identity in the big scheme of things,” Laingen said. “I think we all like to think of ourselves as having some sort of roots somewhere.”