I didn’t mean to suggest any two states I mentioned are necessarily different from each other (or similar to each other, either). That said I did find Iowa felt pretty distinct from Minnesota when I lived in the latter, largely because MSP felt like it had more urban gravity than any place I visited in Iowa, and MSP had a strong cultural affinity with Chicago which I didn’t get a whiff of in Iowa.

They’re probably more alike than any other two states I mentioned, but they felt worlds apart even so.

It is usually just a ratio of urban to rural voting population, which is a proxy for some combination of ratio of young to old voting population, or ratio of white to non white voting population, or ratio of university educated to non university educated voting population.

Minnesota’s urban population is much higher than Iowa’s, so state level politics are more dictated by voters who are some combination of younger/non white/university educated, whereas in Iowa, it is the opposite.