Why are Americans so... A map of American state stereotypes, generated by Google autocomplete
From the post:
In the months before a US Presidential election, the quality of political discourse hits new lows. Blue State/Red State tropes dominate the news cycle as the media gins up outrage over perceived injustices in the culture wars. It’s all about our differences. So I started wondering, how do Americans really think about “those people” in other states? What are the most common stereotypes? For each of the fifty states and DC, I asked Google: “Why is [State] so ” and let it autocomplete. It seemed like an ideal question to get at popular assumptions, since “Why is [State] so X?” presupposes that X is true.
And while I think Ohio may have been slightly miscast, this was a real ingenious exercise by the author. Some of the assessments were dead on (California) while others showed that people really don't pay much attention to a given state (Arkansas). All that being said, here is what was recorded for Ohio.
Why is Ohio...
so important
so boring
so important in the primaries