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The Red White & Blue of Berrien County

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In case you were wondering, Berrien County stacks up pretty well when it comes time to measure how American we are in Michigan's Great Southwest. With both the 4th of July and a landmark election around the corner, the folks at WalletHub decided that now is a pretty good time to ask "Which U.S. metropolitan areas bleed the most red, white and blue?" All things considered, Berrien County ranks above average in virtually every measure under consideration.

WalletHub is a leading personal-finance website that routinely tracks the status of many situations across the nation and puts out ranking lists on all sorts of quirky data. Their new study of Metro Areas That Most & Least Resemble the U.S. has been released and in it Berrien County ranks as the 108th metro most like the U.S. out of the 379 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) that were researched. When the ranks are broken into small-sized metro areas in the country, Berrien ranks 15th.

The folks at WalletHub contend that the study is important for many reasons including helping decide whether we want cultural variety or uniformity, learning which cities exceed or lag behind national standards for certain factors such as education or income, and also finding the most fertile ground to develop an entrepreneur's business ideas.

To determine which metro areas most and least mirror national standards, the crew at WalletHub examined various demographical statistics for the 379 largest U.S. metro areas, or SMAs. The Niles-Benton Harbor SMA — essentially all of Berrien County — showed these results in the rankings. Since a rank of 190th would be considered "average," Berrien ranks above average in each of these categories measured by WalletHub:
 

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  • 135th for Gender
  • 47th for Race
  • 52nd for Household Makeup
  • 126th for Percent of Population with Health Insurance Coverage
  • 125th for Household Income
  • 140th for the Wealth Gap
  • 102nd for Educational Attainment

The most American metro in the lineup turns out to be Indianapolis, followed closely by Cincinnati and Oklahoma City. In Michigan, the Detroit metro was ranked 39th overall, Kalamazoo-Portage was ranked 97th, and Grand Rapids-Wyoming clocks in just ahead of Berrien County at 105th on the list. South Bend-Mishawaka is ranked 131st, Battle Creek checks in at 136th, Flint is 174th, Jackson is 236th, Saginaw 244th, Elkhart 245th, Lansing & East Lansing are 247th, and Traverse City is 317th among those measured. The top ranked small MSA is Racine, Wisconsin, 

So grab some apple pie, enjoy the fireworks, and settle in for an All-American 4th of July celebration, Southwest Michigan…your red, white and blue are showing well.
 

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