In America, states now celebrate not just flowers but their own desserts, minerals, neckwear—even firearms. Is there any meaning to the madness? By Casey Cep  Illustration by Nicholas Konrad; Source photographs by Getty If your New Year’s resolution is to stop obsessively reading post-election analyses, then perhaps you would welcome another way of understanding these United States. What do Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia have in common? Not much, if you glance at a voting map, but in a sense all seven have been red for some time: they share the same state bird, the northern cardinal. Forget the crumbling blue wall and consider this white one instead: eleven states—Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin—all celebrate the white-tailed deer as their state animal or, in some cases, their state mammal. An even larger swath of common ground has held since the nineteen-eighties, when states began declaring milk to be their official drink—some twenty do so today, including not only Wisconsin and New York but also others with far weaker ties to the dairy industry, from as far south as Louisiana to as far west as Oregon. | 
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