I'm from the midwest and feel completely at home in the Bay, and no where else in Cali. It's full of transplants, lots of small towns sort of strung together, with a totally middle class feel despite the money in the area.

The kind of person who moves from the mid west and then feels at home in is not representative of the average midwesterner. The cultural values are very different and that's before you even get into politics.

There's a pretty big difference between midwesterners that grew up in rural areas and ones that grew up in cities. The cultural values might not be that different depending on where you're actually from.

Yeah, my description would have been more along the lines of a long line of pretty generic suburban sprawl punctuated by a few walkable town centers, a university campus, and so forth. But mostly congested sprawl.