It’s suddenly cool to be a Midwesterner, at least for awhile.
That is, until the political campaign rhetoric machine beats that identity like a hungry teenager smacking the bottom of a stubborn ketchup bottle.
Eyes turned toward America’s midsection this week, when Vice President Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz to be her running mate on the 2024 Democratic ticket. Harris, the party’s nominee for president, picked Walz, the governor of Minnesota, to be the vice presidential nominee. His folksy, Midwestern style is being viewed as providing a balance to Harris, a former California attorney general and senator.
Weeks earlier, New Yorker-turned-Floridian Donald Trump named another Midwesterner, first-term Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, as his VP choice. Vance was born in Middletown, Ohio, yet also identifies as a Kentuckian because he spent summers with his grandparents in the Blue Grass state. Some Kentucky residents consider their state part of the Midwest, though most connect with the South.
The Midwest is having a moment.
Jon Lauck believes respect for the region is long overdue. The Sioux Falls, South Dakota resident’s credentials ooze Midwest — founding president of the Midwestern History Association, editor of the Middle West Review, and author of books such as “The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest” and “The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History.”
“You can’t understand the larger American story if you don’t understand that region,” Lauck said Thursday.
His work spotlights a region that “has been systematically ignored in academia for 30 or 40 years,” he said. “We’re trying to change that.”
Lauck added, “I think it’s a noble cause.”
One element of that effort involves defining the region’s borders. “This issue constantly comes up: What is ‘the Midwest’?” Lauck said.
Geography experts firmly place Minnesota in the Midwest.
“Minnesota, along with Wisconsin, part of the Dakotas, and at least Upper Michigan, has always been identified by geographers as the Upper Midwest,” confirmed Mike Kukral, Rose-Hulman geography professor emeritus.
Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics includes 12 states in the Midwest — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.
Yet, people in other states claim a degree of Midwestern-ness. Last fall, Lauck and the Middle West Review — an academic journal at the University of South Dakota, where he also serves as an adjunct professor — and Emerson College Polling in Boston teamed up to study the breadth of Midwestern identity and its boundaries. They surveyed more than 11,000 residents of 22 states. It revealed some surprises.
In 10 of the 12 states recognized as Midwestern by the federal government’s definition, 91% or more of residents consider themselves living in the Midwest. The outliers were Michigan at 85.5% and Ohio at 78.2%. The states with residents most strongly feeling Midwestern were Iowa at 96.7% Minnesota at 96.5%, compared to 91.6% in Indiana and 93.8% for Illinois.
As a Hoosier, I’m baffled by the 8.4% of Indiana respondents to the survey who don’t identify as Midwestern. Where on earth do they think this is?
Overall, the survey’s numbers weren’t unexpected, Lauck said. Still, views from some of the other states were a bit surprising.
“Also interesting was how far west the label went,” Lauck said. The percentages of Midwestern-feeling residents included 53.5% in Wyoming, 42.1% in Colorado, 30.1% in Montana and 25.2% in Idaho.
Idaho in the Midwest?
The attachment extends to Great Plains, Southern and Eastern states, too. Among Oklahomans, most — 66.2% — say they’re in the Midwest, as do 26.6% of Arkansans and 30.% of Kentuckians, along with smaller batches in West Virginia, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.
The definition transcends mere geography. It’s also culture, history, economics and more.
“It’s all those things,” Lauck said.
To a degree, it’s small-town life. “I’m thinking Indiana and the movie ‘Hoosiers,’” Lauck said. But it’s also the region’s larger cities, such as Indianapolis; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Sioux Falls, South Dakota and others. Many residents of those states’ smaller towns have moved into such metros, and that affects the cities, continuing that Midwestern feel.
“When people move into big cities, they sort of maintain that cultural identity,” Lauck said.
The new Democratic VP pick, Tim Walz, grew up in Valentine, Nebraska, population 2,737, before moving to tinier Butte, Nebraska, where his high school graduating class included just 25 kids. College and Army National Guard service took him to Texas and then to Minnesota, his wife’s home state. Before entering politics, Walz taught social studies and coached football in Mankato, Minnesota — slightly smaller that Terre Haute — and later served in Congress, and then got elected as Minnesota governor twice.
Walz’s plain-spoken approach has drawn attention, despite his national anonymity. Business Insider, a financial news site, compiled a list of “the most Midwestern things Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has ever done.” Those range from winning a congressional cooking and sharpshooting contests to doing a car-repair tip video, carving a school bus from butter at the Minnesota State Fair and talking up Runza, his favorite Nebraska fast-food restaurant.
Just as Midwest is having a moment, so is Minnesota.
While the North Star State is securely Midwestern among scholars, it got nudged toward identifying more as “North” during the governorship of Walz’s predecessor. Two sons of former Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton stirred an effort for residents to “embrace the ‘North’” as a 2017 story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune described.
“It was all a marketing thing,” Lauck said. “It wasn’t based in people’s experiences.”
Minnesota native and former Indiana State University basketball standout Brian Giesen said, despite attempts to shift the state’s identity, “we always did kind of consider ourselves in the Midwest, growing up.”
Giesen grew up in New Prague, Minnesota, a town of 8,277 residents about 30 miles southwest of Minneapolis. He came to Terre Haute in 1997 to study and play basketball under late Coach Royce Waltman at ISU, and stayed until 2003, before moving back to Minnesota. Twelve years ago, Giesen he moved back to Terre Haute. He has three grown stepsons with his wife, Melissa, and they have a 9-year-old son. Giesen works as a solutions engineer for Cisco, and does color commentary on Sycamore games for ISU’s media.
He remains a diehard fan of his home state’s teams, too, including the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings, who lost four Super Bowls in the 1970s and haven’t returned since. “My wife even asks, ‘Why don’t you pick a different team that wins more often?’” Giesen said, with a chuckle. Others wonder, “Why would you want to live there? It’s so cold all time time.” Indeed, average winter temperatures range from 15 to 25 degrees.
But that gets to the heart of being a Minnesotan.
“They’re extremely loyal, almost to a fault,” Giesen said, to go with traits of hard work and trustworthiness.
“It’s not a fair-weather state,” Giesen added.
Midwest indeed.
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