Jed Kolko writing for FiveThirtyEight:

We all, of course, have our own notions of what real America looks like. Those notions might be based on our own nostalgia or our hopes for the future. If your image of the real America is a small town, you might be thinking of an America that no longer exists.

He’s only comparing age, education and race/ethnicity so we could quibble with his findings, but it’s still pretty interesting and it’s not like any other combination of variables would be less arbitrary for something like this.

Of the metro areas with at least 500,000 people, Kolko calculates the Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI metro area as having the sixth most similar demographics to the United States overall (behind New Haven, CT, Tampa, FL, Hartford, CT, Oklahoma City, OK, and Springfield, MA).

Springfield. Springfield, Massachusetts? Nice work, Simpsons.