Colin Woodard (in his widely-discussed book American Nations) considers both the Northeast and the Great Lakes/Upper Midwest to be mostly “Yankeedom”- when the population of the Upper Midwest started growing rapidly many of the settlers originated from the Northeast, roughly Pennsylvania up through New England, and so there were clear cultural and familial links between the two areas. This is in opposition to the “Lower Midwest”, where there were migration pathways of Virginia-West Virginia-Ohio, Virginia-Kentucky-Indiana/Illinois, and Virginia/Carolina-Tennessee-Missouri that predominated instead.

Today the religious landscape still follows those trends pretty well, and some cultural/political attitudes also match the historical patterns, but I think the linkages are weakening. In a different way, there’s been a shared deindustrialization experience in the midsize and large cities of the Midwest and the midsize cities of the Northeast, so the urban economic situation and the outward migration from these “Rust Belt” places look similar.

In suburbia and rural areas it seems like a cultural ties with the south and west are getting stronger in the Midwest pretty much everywhere, in a way that differs from the trends in New England (but maybe not in the mid-Atlantic).