Pollsters and political experts routinely try to put their finger on the pulses of what “real Americans” are talking about, but one publication’s effort to come up with the U.S. state that is most representative of the country yielded a fascinating result.

According to the data crunched by Lenny Bronner of The Washington Post, the state considered to be the “most normal” in the country is Illinois, owing to a wide variety of factors that includes a population well split between urban and rural residents, among a host of other factors.

According to Bronner’s work, Illinois most closely resembles the United States as a whole when it comes to the racial makeup of its population when broken down to percentages of…