Sh!t rolls downhill. In Chicago, when we wanted to make fun of slack-jawed yokels, we made fun of Indiana. In Indiana, they did the same, but the target became Kentucky. Not sure who Kentuckians look down on, but I'm sure there's someone.
West Virginia, or better yet, Appalachian people?
My mom, who was raised in rural Indiana, went to UK in Lexington, and worked her twenties in downtown Chicago, would attest to exactly how you're progressing this food chain. She would say people in Louisville and Lexington made fun of the coal mining Eastern Kentuckians and West Virginians.
IMO (and without any intention of pretentiousness), east of the Rockies, I divide rural white American into two broad groups: The "farmer" and the "hunter" - the divide based on how their lands dictate sustenance.
Since farming lends itself to stricter routine, dependable work ethic, maintaining machinery, and well organized local economies connected by rail to fellow farming economies, I find the farming regions less redneck-y than the more isolated "squirrel hunting" regions across the Ozarks (Missouri/Arkansas) AND the Appalachian regions of Western PA, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Virginia, Coal Mining Kentucky, Smokey MTN Tennessee, and Western Carolina where the rockier, uneven soils do not lend toward growing Corn and Grain.
Case in point, looking back on my midwestern youth, Missouri had the more redneck-y reputation than Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota. The barns on the lower half of the Missouri Ozarks side of the border were never as well maintained (if not gone to hell by the time the Meth epidemic hit the Ozarks hard in the early 2000s). Deer/Turkey hunting was a much more emphasized activity, kids wore their hunting camo to school, more rifles were owned in nearly every household, and the roads weren't as efficiently designed due to their templating off old logging and mining trails rather than the flatter, more grid-like farm-to-market roads networking northward the corn farming counties in the Upper Midwest and westward across the many shallower-soiled grain counties heading past Salinas and Grand Island.
