Where Is America’s Heartland? Pick Your Map (Published 2017) (2024)

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The heartland is, by definition, somewhere central. But where the center begins and ends — what it encompasses and excludes — is harder to say. Here’s how your answer compares with those of other Times readers:

What the maps actually show, and what other Times readers thought

Illinois? Definitely the heartland. The South Side of Chicago? Not so clear. Philadelphia? Too close to the coast. But coal country, 120 miles inland, may be. Cumberland County, Tenn., is in the South, not the Midwest. But is it also in the heartland? What about Detroit, with its demographics and politics that little resemble rural Iowa? Or the Standing Rock Indian Reservation straddling the Dakotas?

The word captures an idea that is more expansive than the Midwest, harder to map than Appalachia, more evocative than the Great Plains. But now we are searching for its boundaries, after an election that pundits proclaimed cast the heartland against the rest of America.

“It’s much more a state of mind than an actual place,” suggests the historian William Cronon (who teaches in Madison, Wis., which is surely the heartland, unless your heartland omits liberal college towns). “It describes a deep set of beliefs about places that somehow authentically stand for America.”

In that sense, the word is not purely about geography. It’s a value judgment. “Who’s authentically from the middle? Who’s from implicitly the heart? Who represents the core?” Mr. Cronon said. Any of those questions could have a dual meaning. Who’s mainstream? Whose traditions are “traditional”? Who claims the political center? “There’s a slippage here,” Mr. Cronon said.

To pin down this elusive place, we used data from the presidential election, the census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics – even data about television preferences from Facebook – to map the many meanings of the word, if we’re really being honest about what we mean. This map is our point of departure:

The heartland as a synonym for “the Midwest”

That’s roughly the Midwest, a contiguous though still contested place. The black line captures the region as the Census Bureau defines it. The shaded states beyond add data from 1,357 respondents who said they identified “a lot” or “some” as Midwesterners in a survey for FiveThirtyEight. Even Midwesterners can’t agree on what’s in the Midwest.

The idea of the heartland is closely linked to the Midwest, although the earliest use of “heartland” in this sense had nothing to do with America. Halford Mackinder, a British geographer, coined the word in 1904 to refer to the heart of the Eurasian land mass: a strategic center of industry, natural resources and power. Whoever controlled that region, Mr. Mackinder argued, could control the world (a theory the Germans adopted during World War II).

Postwar, the language came to apply to the middle of America, too, not just for its centrality, but also its national importance. “In this classic European Mackinder sense, this is where the industrial heartland of the country was,” said Jon Lauck, a Midwestern historian and an adviser to Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican. “This is where they brought all those bombers out of Willow Run to bomb Hitler and Japan,” he said, referring to the manufacturing complex in Michigan. “This is where all the railroads met. This is where all the coal and iron ore came from.”

It’s where the grain was grown and the cars were built. The region has since lost some of that might, with deindustrialization and the depopulation of family farms. But Mr. Lauck argues that the heartland and the Midwest remain synonymous, in large part because of this history.

The heartland as “far from the coasts”

The heartland can also be defined by what it’s not — the coasts. And in many ways its cultural values have been framed in opposition to that Other America. “The suspicion persists,” wrote the English professor and critic Barry Gross in 1977, “that what goes on at either coast is the extreme, the perverse and bizarre, the grotesque and the Gothic, unreal and worse, unAmerican.”

The center of the country is the normal against which the coasts are abnormal, or merely peripheral. The above map defines the heartland by this relationship to the coasts, counting inland by county from the ocean on both sides.

But where the interior lies has shifted historically, and it has long been the hardest part of the country to map precisely because it lacks the clear natural boundaries of the coasts. “The West” was once west of the Appalachian Mountains. Today’s Illinois once sat in the “Northwest Territory.” The “middle” moved as white settlers and cartographers did. And this process of revision still hasn’t halted.

“These things aren’t absolute,” said James Akerman, the curator of maps at the Newberry Library in Chicago, describing how we conceive of “region” in America. “And the electorate is showing these things change constantly.”

The heartland as “America’s breadbasket”

Look through newspaper articles, and references to the American “heartland” proliferate in the 1980s with stories about the struggles of the middle part of the country. Toby Higbie, a U.C.L.A. historian who has traced the word’s use over time, pegs its growing prominence to the farm crisis of the 1980s and the economic shifts that began to turn parts of the Midwest into the “Rust Belt.”

“To me, the very ideological or cultural formulation that people are using – whether they’re aware of it or not – comes out of that moment of confronting globalization,” Mr. Higbie said. “And it’s a reaction to that, to sort of say: ‘We are the authentic, quintessential American location. And we want to reinvest in that.’ ”

To the extent that the heartland conjures an America of wheat fields and barns in graceful decay — two images prominent in political ads — it’s capturing the geography mapped above. That picture, which encompasses much of the Great Plains, shows a swath of land down the center of the country, from the Dakotas to Texas, east into Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, and south along the Mississippi River. It also includes California’s Central Valley, which produces about a quarter of the nation’s food.

Add in Manufacturing America, and you pull in more of the Great Lakes states, farther east into Pennsylvania and across much more of the rural South:

The heartland as “home to American manufacturing”

It’s notable, though, Mr. Higbie adds, that stock images of heartland America tend to turn up few faces of color, whether on the farm or in nostalgic manufacturing. When people use the term, he suspects, they’re often envisioning a white version of the Midwest without its most diverse pockets, circ*mscribing Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis, and its Native American reservations.

Map America by at least part of its European heritage (German Americans are the nation’s largest ethnic group, at about 46 million), and you get a patchy Midwest that looks more like this:

The heartland as German-settled America

By that definition, the heartland becomes much harder to map than the Midwest. It’s not just the borders that are in dispute, but the redactions as well. Is the heartland really the middle of America minus the minorities? Or the middle, rural parts only? Or the middle, in an election year, discounting its islands of blue?

Expand the heritage map to include what are today the whitest parts of the country, and you get this:

The heartland as predominantly white America

That map overlaps significantly with the places where Donald J. Trump fared well this fall (and excludes those Midwestern cities where he did poorly). And, in fact, in its loosest definition postelection, the heartland has been used to describe virtually anywhere in America that tilted toward the Republican candidate.

Breitbart, the site formerly run by Mr. Trump’s campaign chief executive and adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, declared in a viral headline and misleading map after the election that Trump won a “7.5 million-vote popular landslide” in the heartland. The contorted math behind that figure counted Trump’s margin in 3,084 of 3,141 American counties, excluding big urban centers like New York and Los Angeles — a convenient way of defining nearly all of the country’s land area (if not all of its people) as heartland.

In that context, the word heartland was used to suggest that Mr. Trump won the popular vote in authentic America — or, put another way, the true American vote. Taken to this extreme, the word loses all geographic meaning; it no longer even describes the interior. This is what the heartland looks like as Trump’s America:

The heartland as “Trump’s America”

That last map recalls a 1969 book by the Republican strategist Kevin Phillips, “The Emerging Republican Majority.” In it, he predicted Republican success from a new coalition of the interior “heartland” — “the land of Methodist church suppers, mile-high mining camps, county fairs, steamboats, round the bend, cattle drives, waving wheat” — with suburbia, the South and the Sun Belt.

“His heartland strategy only works if you close your eyes and imagine any urban space or place with significant people of color as not part of the heartland,” Mr. Higbie said. Geographically, that definition falls apart. Politically, Mr. Higbie says, it was genius, tying to the Republican Party deeply rooted ideas about “real” America. “You take a regional name, detach it from the actual physical region,” Mr. Higbie said, “and move it around the country selectively to the places that match your electoral strategy.”

That is essentially what Breitbart did.

These maps highlight how the heartland is usually about more than geography — whether it’s also about demographics, economics, ideology or history. And so we close with a couple of maps that seek, in the end, to define this place through cultural ties. The first brings us most closely back to Mr. Lauck’s Midwest:

The heartland as sports fandom

There’s no box to check on the census for which team you root for, but millions of fans make their preferences public on Facebook. In 2014 we mapped the borders of baseball fandom, and the map above uses the same data with a small twist. It shows where the league’s “Central” divisions – that is, the American League Central and National League Central – hold the most regional sway.

That picture neatly reflects much of the Midwest without need for state borders and creeps over the state lines, as with Pennsylvania, where the Midwest grows hazy. It offers the cleanest, most compact idea of the heartland of any map shown here. As with the others, it reveals a place that is whiter and more Republican than the country as a whole.

Of course, the heartland is about more than baseball, should you believe in the heartland at all. But seemingly trivial maps — think too of soda vs. pop in our dialects — can capture much more complex differences among us. With that in mind, here is the map we at The Upshot believe comes closest to capturing what many people mean by the heartland in this hyper-partisan moment:

The heartland as a cultural taste test

With thanks to our colleague Josh Katz, that’s a map of where people are most likely to prefer television shows like “Duck Dynasty,” “N.C.I.S.” and “The Voice” most distinctly. It’s messier than the Midwest. It clips out major metro areas. It pulls in a big stretch of the Great Plains and some of the South, unifying through cultural taste places that are variously rural, red and for the most part interior. Maine, admittedly, is something of an anomaly.