What is the Midwest? Here's what people in Wisconsin, Idaho, Ohio think

Midwestern identity is a funny thing, a marker in a region that sometimes gets little respect from those who reside on the coasts.

But you know it when you see it, or feel it, whether on a map or in the wider culture.

A new survey by Emerson College Polling and the scholarly journal Middle West Review digs a little deeper into this notion of Midwestern identity with two intriguing questions posed to more than 11,000 people across 22 states.

Do you consider yourself to live in the Midwest? Do you consider yourself a Midwesterner?

If you live Wisconsin, you instinctively know the answers: 94% of those surveyed said they "live in the Midwest" while 86% consider themselves to be Midwesterners.

Strong majorities expressed similar views in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Illinois, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma and Wyoming.

The strongest sense of Midwestern identity was found in Iowa and Minnesota, where 97% of those surveyed in each state consider themselves to live in the Midwest.

Even 66% of Oklahomans identify with the Midwest, despite the state being considered part of the Great Plains.

"There are a lot of people and I would say a lot of people outside the Midwest in particular who don't think the Midwest is a region," said Jon Lauck, editor of the Middle West Review. "It has fuzzy boundaries and people think regional identity here is weak or weaker than other places. What this survey shows is regional identity is really strong."

"If you get 94 percent of people to say they are anything or anything is true in this polarized environment, that is amazing," he said.

It also turns out Midwestern identity and boundaries are more elastic than we realized.

Lauck, author of "The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest" said a closer look at the data may help researchers determine the "edges" of the Midwest in places like southeastern Ohio or western North Dakota.

Those places could be less Midwestern than other parts of those states, Lauck said.

“It is traditional to use the 100th meridian as a dividing line between the agrarian Midwest and the high plains,” Lauck said in a news release. “But this data indicates that the Midwest extends farther west toward the Rockies and that few people identify as plainsmen. More than 40% of Coloradoans, mostly on the Eastern slope and closer to the Midwest, consider themselves Midwestern. Over half of Wyomingites do.”