Sun Belt, Rust Belt, Barbecue Belt: America’s debatable regions

Rust Belt. Sun Belt. Bible Belt. Grain Belt. Barbecue Belt. Beltway.

The United States it may be, but in reality, America is a patchwork of regions. And now these terms and others, which evolved from a shorthand to describe geographical groupings, are getting a quadrennial workout as the presidential campaign nears its end. But what do they actually mean?

“The United States is an incredibly complicated country,” said Colin Woodard, author of “American Nations,” a history of regional cultures in North America. “The actual underlying things that people are trying to describe often don’t match the state boundaries.”

While television networks put these regional terms through their paces on election night, the geographic designations can be incredibly confusing for anyone who is not glued to Steve Kornacki’s magic board. We’ve got you covered.

Let’s start with the basics: color coding

For decades, states where voters overwhelmingly favor Republicans have been known as red states and states that swing for Democrats have been known as blue states. Back when TV went full color, the decision of which color went with which party was largely arbitrary among producers and there was no consensus among media companies. That changed in the 2000 presidential election, when the results dragged on for weeks and media companies, including The New York Times, craved consistency.

It’s not as simple as red and blue

Voters in purple states, more often known as swing states or battleground states, show about equal support for both major parties. In most elections, these states determine the outcome of a presidential race. On one end of the color spectrum is the blue wall, a group of states that have historically voted solidly Democratic in presidential races. They include New York, Massachusetts, Oregon and California.

The blue wall has been used recently in reference to its fragility in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, three states that were reliably blue before Donald Trump won them in 2016.

The range of a geographic region depends on whom you ask

Many regions are described as belts, or wide swaths of the country that share something in common. One of the first such designations was the Sun Belt, coined by political analyst Kevin Phillips in 1969 to describe the sunny southern states where white Democrats were migrating after the Civil Rights Movement (and which were ripe for Republican gains). The region is undoubtedly amorphous, but using the widest definition, it stretches from Florida to parts of Southern California, including the Gulf States, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, with northern fringes in Colorado and North Carolina.

The Sun Belt includes at least one subregion: the Deep South. That area is made up of states along the Gulf of Mexico as well as South Carolina, and it might include the western part of Tennessee, depending on whom you ask. All of these states were part of the Confederacy.

The Middle West, or Midwest, is defined by the Census Bureau as Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

Within that region are the Great Plains, which contain states known for their rolling farmland. They sit in the middle of the country, stretching from as far north as North Dakota to parts of Northern Texas.

But neither of those terms sounds as romantic as the Heartland, which was coined by the National Geographic Society and its magazine in 1952, Woodard said. “That kind of stuck by the 1960s — the major popular magazines took that lead and continued to popularize it,” he said. “That took hold as a way to describe that same region in more emotive terms.”

Beyond the Heartland, the Mountain West is defined by the Rocky Mountains and includes states like Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho. In some definitions, Montana, Arizona and New Mexico are part of it, too.

If all of that seems too complicated, you may also hear pundits refer to everything between the East and West Coasts as Flyover Country, an area that has “supposedly been neglected and forgotten about,” Woodard said.

Culture and industry define other regions

To confuse things even more, the Deep South is entirely within what’s known as the Bible Belt, which includes Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Missouri and East Texas. There, “Protestant, evangelical Christianity is an incredibly powerful culture source,” Woodard said.

Former steel, coal and manufacturing industries defined the amorphous swath of land known as the Rust Belt, which includes parts of Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and portions of upstate New York.

When state populations were surging in the Sun Belt, Rust Belt states began to lose populations as manufacturing jobs dried up. The term dates to the 1984 presidential race, when the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, claimed that President Ronald Reagan was “turning our industrial Midwest into a rust bowl.” Journalists misheard the quote, Woodard said, and started using Rust Belt frequently. Some Americans consider it disparaging or dated.

There are also food-based belts, like the Grain Belt (where, you guessed it, lots of crops grow). It stretches from Iowa to Ohio and is also known as the Corn Belt. The Barbecue Belt might have more debate over levels of vinegar than over politics in states like the Carolinas.

But the beating heart of American politics is Washington, D.C., which is inside the Beltway, a 64-mile interstate highway that encircles the nation’s capital and its immediate suburbs. That term is often used to describe the political landscape.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.