Walt Hickey discusses geographic self-identification:

Here’s a somewhat regular argument I get in: Which states make up which regions of the United States? Some of these regions — the West Coast, Mountain States, Southwest and Northeast are pretty clearly defined — but two other regions, the South and the Midwest, are more nebulous.

I’m from New York, and I generally consider anything west of Philadelphia the Midwest. This admittedly unsophisticated designation is frequently criticized by self-avowed Midwesterners. My boss, originally of Michigan, has many opinions about what, precisely, falls into the Midwest. So I decided to find out which states Midwesterners consider to be in their territory.

To get this broad-based view, we asked SurveyMonkey Audience to ask self-identified Midwesterners which states make the cut. We ran a national survey that targeted the Midwest from March 12 to March 17, with 2,778 respondents. Of those, 1,357 respondents  identified “a lot” or “some” as a Midwesterner. We then asked this group to identify the states they consider part of the Midwest.

There are a lot of things here worth looking into. First, many people aren’t too sure about where the core of the Midwest is. Everybody selected at least one state for the question. But even Illinois — home of the preeminent Midwestern city, Chicago — was identified as Midwestern by just about 80 percent of respondents. …

Several self-proclaimed Midwestern sources I spoke with have a very limited definition of the Midwest: namely, their state and any state bordering it. Minnesotans thought they made up the true Midwest; Hoosiers thought they did. I can’t say either way. …

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.

As for the rest of the states, it seems unclear whether they’re in the true Midwest.

If anything, the Midwest is as nebulous as I’d expected. Too often, people refer to vast swaths of American territory as a solid region. It’s easy to break Americans into tribes such as “Midwestern,” but there are more subdivisions and diversity in these groupings than we generally acknowledge.

The first and most obvious question: If Wisconsin isn’t in the Midwest, where are we? The Great White North? (Better not answer that one. For this week we’re in The Great Gray North.)

This comes up when comparing states of the Midwest on such issues as business climate, because to compare Midwestern states, you have to define “Midwestern.”

One obvious definition would be to use the states of the Big Ten Conference — Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. Well, that’s the old Big Ten Conference, until Penn State joined. (Even though it could be argued that maybe western Pennsylvania is sort of Midwestern, but eastern Pennsylvania definitely is not.) Then Nebraska joined the now-Big T1e2n; Nebraska might be in the Midwest, but it’s also part of the Plains. And now that definition is obsolete with Rutgers and Maryland joining next year. No one with any brain cells thinks Maryland and New Jersey are in the Midwest.

Missouri seems to be in the Midwest according to the sports media, at least the sports media covering the St. Louis Cardinals. If Nebraska is in the Midwest, what about Kansas to the south and the Dakotas to the north? And what about Kentucky, which is mostly equidistant to the upper Midwest as Missouri?

I haven’t experienced this personally, but I’ve read numerous times that southern Illinois and Indiana seem to some more like the South — again, however you define that — than the Midwest.

This also comes up in, of all places, weather. The Farmers Almanac puts Wisconsin and everything else Midwest that is east of the Mississippi River in the “Midwest/Great Lakes.” West of that is the “North Central U.S.”

The Old Farmers Almanac divides the country into 18 weather areas …

… with Wisconsin split thrice. We southwesterners are supposedly in the Heartland, while Milwaukee and thereabouts are in the Lower Lakes, and the rest of the state is in the Upper Midwest.