White, rural and homogeneous. New Hampshire and Iowa play big roles in choosing presidential candidates but don't look much like the rest of the country.
A better bellwether might be Illinois. It's the most average state, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from the Census Bureau.
Illinois is the fifth-largest state, with a big city in Chicago, rolling countryside in the south and a lot of sprawling suburbs. And it has Peoria, which, it turns out, really is a barometer of America's preferences. Many companies continue to use the city in central Illinois as a test market, taking literally the adage about how things play there.
"Illinois has always been a mirror of America," said State Sen. Kirk Dillard, a Republican. "With all due respect to South Carolina, Iowa and New Hampshire, they are not reflective of the overall American population."
Of course skeptics--and liberals will remark that Illinois is a deep blue state. That is true, but two factors cause this unhappy (for me) situation. One is the finely tuned Daley Machine that turns out gazillions of Democratic votes in Cook County every two years. The second is the implosion of the Illinois Republican Party that came about as a result of four years of disastrous rule by now-disgraced Governor George H. Ryan.
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