[ashark]

Part of it's the size of the area in which the inhabitants consider themselves Midwestern, and the lack of unifying landforms (a mountain range, an ocean) to give them common experiences, I think.

For instance, it seems like when the Midwestern region comes up[0], people usual mean the upper midwest and especially the Lakes states, which is weird to me as someone who's lived in Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa, because down here we don't really mean to include Lakes states when we say "Midwestern". I mean, there's stuff there. Outdoors stuff. That's worth doing/seeing. That you can reach in less than one entire day of travel by car. Doesn't seem too Midwestern to me, or to have much to do with my experience of Midwesterness (I gather they'd disagree, which is my point). The Lakes states, including Minnesota and Michigan and at least the northern 1/3 of Illinois (and certainly anything East of Illinois) are a Western extension of the East from our perspective.

[0, EDIT] by which I mean when the region comes up in articles, or on the Internet generally.

[MarchHare]

Being from central Kansas, I always say I'm from the great plains. Lumping the prairie into it's own group always seemed useful to me.

[boxy310]

I had a very bitter argument about whether Kansas was Midwestern or not. An important distinction is that what's now considered the "Midwest" used to be just called the "West", and that the Great Plains formed a natural barrier of relatively lower rainfall that settlers headed out to Oregon or California would be crossing over before they hit the Mountain West. As a result, settlers in Kansas had lots of natural connections to Missouri, which is fairly clearly in the Midwest.

[ovulator]

I always thought that the Missouri river was kind of the western border to the midwest. So Kansas City, which straddles the river is still in the Midwest, and a very large chunk of Kansas' population lives there and are midwestern, the western chunk of the state is much different.

[aaron-lebo]

Yeah, the Midwest or Midwestern culture extends well into places that get identified with other regions. Plenty of people from Oklahoma and Missouri that fit it. What's more Midwestern than being called the "Show Me State"?