State Hate: The Fifty State Smackdown

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Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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25 Responses

  1. Avatar Kolohe says:

    Upon reflection, my expectations were that while West Virginia hated Virginia, Virginia would hate Maryland more, home of the hemisphere’s worst automobile drivers. To Virginia, West Virginia is more of a “I don’t think of you at all”.Report

  2. Avatar LeeEsq says:

    I don’t believe that Florida hates itself. I know people from Florida. They have too much proud dysfunction to hate themselves.Report

  3. Avatar Oscar Gordon says:

    I’m amused by how the whole of the western states hate CAReport

    • Avatar Stillwater in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      A couple decades ago Colorado would have had Texas as most hated state instead of California. Me? I’m old school. I hate Nebraska with a passionate intensity don’t even get me startedReport

    • The California Diaspora in the western states has been a thing for more than 30 years.

      There’s a definite “familiarity breeds contempt” effect. Back when I was fooling with interstate migration and cluster analysis, many of the pairs of states in this post were also the pairs in my results that had large relative migration back and forth (eg, the two Dakotas, Iowa/Nebraska, Texas/Oklahoma, Indiana/Kentucky).Report

    • As a former SoCal guy moved to PDX, I have found that the hate (at least here) is pretty much reserved for folks who move here from the Bay Area, and that’s driven by tech-money arrogance. When I announce that I moved here from L.A., the usual reaction I get is, “Oh, that’s cool.” Either SoCal folks are actually kind of okay, or they’re too superficial for an actual Northwesterner to bother hating upon.Report

      • Avatar Aaron David in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Yeah, the wife and I were both very circumspect about how we told our origin stories. I was actually born in WA and mentioned that, while she, having been born in MI didn’t actually talk about that, but where she works, a very old Oregon institution. I was a while before we mentioned we were from the Bay.Report

  4. Avatar Stillwater says:

    There’s an notable absence of reciprocity in the great lakes states. Minnesota hates Wisconsin, which hates Illinois, which hates Indiana, which hates Kentucky, which hates Tennessee who – finally – returns the hate-favor. That’s Midwestern-nice for ya!Report

  5. Avatar DavidTC says:

    In case anyone’s wondering, Georgia, at least my part of Georgia, generally tends to hate on Florida because people from Florida often do not know how to drive. Curves and hills utterly baffle them. They sometimes completely freak when driving in north-ish Georgia…not even the Appalachian part of it, but just the slightly-hilly Piedmont, where Atlanta is. This would also presumably be the reason why people in north Alabama hate them. (This is also true of drivers from South Georgia, but complaining about ‘Florida Drivers’ is easier than ‘Florida and Coastal regions of Georgia Drivers’.)

    I don’t know why they hate themselves.Report

    • Avatar Pinky in reply to DavidTC says:

      I’d guess that Florida doesn’t hate Florida, but Floridians hate other Floridians. The state is in a civil war that parallels the Civil War – imported Yankees versus Southerners. Relatedly, I bet that all of Illinois but Chicago hates Chicago, but the Chicagoans who hate Indiana outnumber them.Report

  6. Avatar Saul Degraw says:

    Some of these would be more accurate as “which states gives you an inferiority complex?”Report

  7. Avatar Pinky says:

    I’m glad you noted that New Jersey hates everyone. When I first looked at the legend, I thought it was “hates South Dakota”. Don’t get me wrong; I’d admire them for their specificity, but I just didn’t understand it.Report

  8. Avatar Damon says:

    Have you ever been to the florida panhandle? They don’t call it the redneck riveria for no reason. Now, while I’m a guy that grew up in the west, it was the rural west…but I’ve been to the panhandle and redneck is the correct term. Beaches nice though 🙂Report

  9. My (unscientific and anecdotal) sense is that the most populous corner of Illinois (by which I mean Chicago and the collar counties) hates downstate Illinois more than it hates any of its neighbors, including Indiana. It probably lumps downstate Illinois with Indiana and looks condescendingly at northwest Indiana.

    My guess with Colorado is that Texas ranks a (sometimes close, sometimes not so close) second when it comes to which state to hate. New York is probably third. New Jersey might be fourth but that’s probably because there’s a sense that they’re expected to hate NJ, not that they have any strong feelings about that state one way or the other. The plains states probably come in next.Report

    • Avatar Pinky in reply to Gabriel Conroy says:

      Chicagoans consider anything from Colorado to Pennsylvania as downstate / Indiana.Report

    • My recollections over the last 30 years is that Coloradans don’t hate Texas, they hate individual Texans. Particularly those visiting Colorado. If a skier runs wild and crashes through a crowd, the automatic assumption is that it’s a Texan. When the new owner of a ranch up in one of the mountain valleys shoots up his neighbor’s bison herd, the automatic assumption is that it’s a Texan. Sometime in the last few years I was sitting someplace with local news on the TV and they reported one of the forest fires had been started by someone camping illegally, burning an open fire during a ban, and didn’t douse it properly before they left. I heard a person behind me mutter, “Fncking Texans.”Report

  10. Californians used to hate Texas because of the way the Cowboys kicked our football teams around, so they must have polled mostly retirees who’d remember that.Report

    • Who, then, do average Californians actually hate? “Precious, quirky, preachy Oregonians” is certainly a candidate, but I assure you everything aggravating about Oregonians (by which is usually meant “Portlanders”) is doubled when you find a Seattleite, with an extra dash of tech-money arrogance to boot.Report