Pollsters and political experts routinely try to put their finger on the pulses of what “real Americans” are talking about, but one publication’s effort to come up with the U.S. state that is most representative of the country yielded a fascinating result.
According to the data crunched by Lenny Bronner of The Washington Post, the state considered to be the "most normal" in the country is Illinois, owing to a wide variety of factors that includes a population well split between urban and rural residents, among a host of other factors.
According to Bronner’s work, Illinois most closely resembles the United States as a whole when it comes to the racial makeup of its population when broken down to percentages of white, Latinx, Black, Asian and Native-American residents.
It also most closely resembles the United States in another key area, and that’s the breakdown of income levels, according to the data.
The Post dove into a whole host of data, but of the 30 variables were examined, Illinois came out on top in terms of its similarity to the country as a whole, edging out Florida, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
Coincidentally, the Post isn’t the first publication to dub Illinois as a representative of America as a whole. NPR released a dataset back in 2016 when evaluating which state should kick off presidential primary season, and Illinois was described as “perfectly average” because of its mirroring of the nation in terms of race, age, religion, and other factors.
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