I may be guilty of a bit of Indiana bashing even though I should know better since I've lived in rural areas (Texas and Ontario, for those keeping track): there is always a blend of people in any region; reducing complicated political differences into a Red-Blue divide serves nobody. Lauren Bruce defends her state from the clueless political reporters:
Hoosiers have been in the national spotlight over the past few weeks, and I’ve noted that many disparaging stereotypes make it into the national media coverage of my fair state -- stereotypes that reinforce the myth of a beer-drinking, pickup-driving Republican stronghold that is hopelessly out of touch with coastal progressivism. As a life-long Indiana resident, I personally vouch for blue veins running through this state and throughout the Midwest, a fact frequently ignored in favor of maintaining the awestruck-hillbilly myth. If reporters and pundits took a look past the stereotypes, they’d see that Indiana is a lot more complex and important than they think it is.
Despite the portrayal of my home state as a white wasteland, Indiana has a long, compelling history of competing ideas and interests. Yes, it was a hotbed for the Ku Klux Klan, but it also had several integral stops on the Underground Railroad. The state housed some of the first utopian societies in the United States, and boasts an internationally known center for modern Quaker society. Indiana was home to Eugene Debs, Socialist Party presidential candidate in the early 1900s and one of the founders of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World. Today the work force is heavily based in manufacturing, more so than in agriculture, and as such is heavily unionized. Where Indiana was once largely a white state infamous for its “sundown towns,” the African American and Latino populations are growing exponentially, and within the last decade the university in my backyard hosted among the largest percentages of foreign students in the United States. But somehow, whenever an outsider writes about Indiana, it's all corn, religion, white supremacists, pickup trucks, and, goddamn it, basketball.
[Click to read more Dispatches From Flyover Country | The American Prospect]
