Why is ohio considered a midwestern state

I'd say no. Of course here in Arizona we tend to think of anything east of the Rockies as "back East. Facebook Twitter Email. The Buckeye State isn't in the Midwest. Clay Thompson The Republic azcentral. Share your feedback to help improve our site! Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota, and Missouri are also indisputably Midwestern. Agreement begins to get tricky right around Nebraska, which heads the next cluster of states, including Michigan, Ohio, and Kansas, followed by the two Dakotas.

North Dakota captured But there's another way to crunch the numbers where both Dakotas do end up in the Midwest, fair and square. If Iowa is the most Midwestern state, then I think it's fair to set the total number of its votes as a baseline for maximum Midwesternness. If you use that as your total, then both states make the cut. Being around the middle of the US geographically is not a guarantor of Midwesternness. We had 18 percent of readers pick Oklahoma as part of the Midwest — way lower than neighboring Kansas right above it.

It's about 19 percent as Midwest as Iowa. If you picked a coastal state, you were most certainly a troll. But surprisingly, the number of people who selected California as a Midwestern state was pretty low — only 53 votes out of 34, What's remarkable is that as long as a reader selected a state with a little distance from a coastline, you still get a pretty fair approximation of the Midwest.

You can use the map below to check out how likely voters were to pick a state based on other states they selected. Our data is available on Github. Second, the potential Midwest spans further south than I thought. If half of our respondents thought Missouri and a quarter thought Oklahoma were in the Midwest, I probably should have asked about Arkansas, if only to pinpoint how far south people think the region expands.

This Yankee regrets the error. Indiana, Iowa and Illinois appear to be the core of the Midwest, each pulling more than 70 percent of the vote that may partly be because of their substantial populations. Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota each pulled at least 60 percent of the vote, so we can probably put them in the Midwest without too much fuss.

Ohio, Missouri and Kansas each got more than half. Too often, people refer to vast swaths of American territory as a solid region.