Is Pa. in the Midwest? Depends if it’s youse or yinz talking.
At least Western Pennsylvania feels that way, say folks who have more in common with Ohio than Philadelphia.
Nearly 10% of Pennsylvanians believe they live in the Midwest.
They are 100% wrong.
Despite this disorienting finding from Middle West Review and Emerson College Polling, the U.S. Census Bureau tells us the commonwealth is very much a Mid-Atlantic state, close kin to New Jersey and New York — and not so much Illinois and Nebraska.
Before dismissing roughly 1.3 million Keystone citizens as being cartographically impaired, however, consider that lots of other folks seem to think the state is Midwestern, too.
We tend to hear this canard more frequently this time of year, when election talk links swing-state Pennsylvania to Rust Belt sisters Michigan and Wisconsin as part of the so-called blue wall of traditionally Democratic-leaning states, worth an invaluable 44 Electoral College votes come Nov. 5.
Then there are those who say that if Pennsylvania isn’t officially Midwestern, certainly the western portion of the state is, at least culturally.
“Pittsburgh is more like Ohio than Philadelphia,” says Steel City real estate agent Mark McClinchie on YouTube. His evidence? “We say pop, not soda.” And, a person named Kristen that he included on his video enthused: “There’s nothing Mid-Atlantic about Pittsburgh. People are kind, loyal, and stuck in their ways.”
More hot-dish than hoagie, could the geographically left side of Pennsylvania be Midwestern after all? We take a look:
First of all, who says Pennsylvania is in the Midwest?
Discussing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the New York Times podcast The Daily on July 22, Peter Baker, the newspaper’s chief White House correspondent, said: “There is a concern by a lot of Democrats about how she will play in some of these Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that are so key to the election.”
Likely an inadvertent slip of the tongue, his mislocation nevertheless lends credence to this whole Pennsylvania-is-not-really-where-we-think-it-is thing.
“I absolutely hear that Pennsylvania is in the Midwest quite often,” said sociologist Michael Glass, director of the urban studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. ”You’ll see it on social media as well.”
Quoting an article from the Age, a Melbourne newspaper, @glografik posted on X, “[Former President Donald] Trump is … losing his edge among white women — the very group that helped propel him to office in 2016, particularly in the Midwest battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.”
A poster on the r/PoliticalDiscussion subreddit wondered, “What is the likelihood that the Midwest states of MI, WI and PA will remain swing states …?”
Come to think of it, what states are considered the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 12-state Midwest region comprises two divisions. There’s the East North Central division of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin; and the West North Central division of Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
Some folks will quibble: “I’m from Minnesota,” communication professor David Kahl Jr. of Penn State Behrend in Erie said. “People say Ohio is almost the Midwest, but I don’t consider it to be. At all.”
As for what constitutes the Mid-Atlantic — it gets tricky.
The Census Bureau lists just three Mid-Atlantic states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. It places eight states in the South Atlantic division: Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. The District of Columbia is also in that group.
But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the Mid-Atlantic comprises the three states listed by the Census Bureau, as well as Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. And the U.S. General Services Administration declares that the region is Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia, and just parts of Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. To confuse matters further, the U.S. Geological Survey lists even more states, including parts of New England.
What can make things more exasperating is the Federal Reserve Bank’s decision to cleave Pennsylvania into East Coast-Midwest categories, placing Philadelphia in one district and Pittsburgh as well as 19 Western Pennsylvania counties in the Cleveland district.
Thus, from a federal vantage, Pennsylvania becomes both a Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern state.
So, do people in Western Pa. really feel like they’re in the Midwest?
Echoing the Emerson survey, a Bloomberg poll from 2019 asked, “Where is the Midwest?” Around 35% of Pittsburgh residents said they think they wake up in it each morning.
“Put together a group of Western Pennsylvania students,” said Villanova University geography professor Frank Galgano, “then give them maps and ask them which state they most closely identify with. They’d say Ohio every time.”
Galgano, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Geographical Society, once lived in Western Pennsylvania. “My friends think I’m a weasel for moving here to Philadelphia,” he said.
People who live in Mercer County on the Ohio border get their TV broadcasts from Youngstown, not Pittsburgh, according to J.J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist who has lived in Erie, Pittsburgh, and now South Philadelphia.
As it happens, Patagonia, Mercer County, is 2,254 feet from the Ohio state line, and 370.2 miles from Philadelphia.
“Calling Pennsylvania Midwestern sounds weird to someone in Bensalem,” he said, “but it’s not strange to someone in Waynesburg [in Greene County].”
It’s also incongruous, Balaban and others say, to consider Pittsburgh to be a Mid-Atlantic metropolis on the same list as Philadelphia, Newark, and New York. What do they have in common?
In the Pittsburgh area, people speak rhapsodically of living a quieter, friendlier life in their town than many could in East Coast Philly.
“In line at the Giant Eagle supermarket here in Pittsburgh,” said Pitt history professor Lara Putnam, director of the school’s Global Studies Center, “you learn about everyone’s health problems. People do oversharing with strangers in a beautiful way.”
Journalists tend to label places such as Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania “more American” than enclaves of “East Coast elites like Philadelphia,” said Matt Jordan, director of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative, which, according to its website, helps students and citizens distinguish “reliable journalism” from “the noise that often overwhelms and divides us.”
Avoiding their labels as unofficially Midwestern or Mid-Atlantic, many Pittsburgh-area citizens consider themselves to be part of yet another classification:
“We live in Appalachia,” said Glass of Pitt, “binding us to a region stretching from eastern Kentucky to Upstate New York.”
Called the “Paris of Appalachia” by author Brian O’Neil, Pittsburgh is the largest city in the Appalachian region, an urban counterpoint to a richly historic rural area.
Ultimately, said Galgano, “three elections from now, Pennsylvania may no longer be a swing state,” garnering the attention it now gets at election time.
“And nobody will remember whether it was ever believed to be part of the Midwest at all.”
Staff writer Gillian McGoldrick contributed to this article.