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High population states that I'd expect to be higher:
New York, mostly due to knowing how high the NYC metro is and knowing that the rest of the state isn't exactly deprived of population; but this is mostly from not properly taking into account how much of NYC metro isn't in NY.
Massachusetts: Again, due to Boston metro not solely being in MA and assuming the rest of the state would make up for it and add a bit more.
Ohio: It's a state with three 2 million pop metros as well as Dayton and Toledo (and Akron and Youngstown). Considering there's also places like Lima and Canton, I would've expected the rest of the state to secretly add up to more.
New Jersey: While it's still densely populated, I would've expected higher based of knowing it's the most dense.
High population states I'd expect to be lower:
Florida: I wouldn't expect it to have a higher population than New York. It'd definitely be the highest population of the southeast, but more along 15-18 million.
Georgia: It's more so that I'd expect it to a smidge lower than North Carolina. Atlanta's big, but NC's got a bunch of fast growing 1 mill+ metros. It's odd to think FL+GA+SC+AL is a little over an eighth of the US population (about the same as CA+NV).
Mid population states I'd expect to be higher:
Tennessee: With Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga, along with the southern tendency to have a sizeable rural population, I would've expected it to be closer to 8 million. I didn't realize the rural areas of the state is less populated than Georgia/Alabama/Virginia/etc.
Washington: Rural area is much less populated than expected
Missouri: With the nicer sides of St. Louis and Kansas city being within the state, I'd expect a bit more population.
Mid states I'd expect to be lower:
Alabama: With lower growth rates than 3/4 of its neighbors, as well as often being lumped with the high poverty states of West Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and New Mexico, I'd expect Alabama to be less populated (Louisiana getting the low pop pass due to New Orleans). Outside of the southwestern quadrant of the state and some of the southeast, the rural areas of the state are quite saturated with people for still qualifying for rural. Population centers in the state are just separate enough to hide the population a bit, like Huntsville/Decatur and Mobile/Daphne both being split metros, or Birmingham's relationship with Anniston and Tuscaloosa not quite being in the CSA (Similar with Dothan and Enterprise).
Indiana: Similar to Alabama, but more a midwestern example
Arizona: Yeah, I get Phoenix is big, but it's always weird to get how big. It's hard to imagine many people living outside Phoenix and Tucson (at least the roughly a million outside the two).
Low states I'd expect higher:
Rhode Island: While small, I'd still expect it to be densely populated enough to have a higher population than the more rural New England states, but it only beats out Vermont.
Hawaii: I wouldn't expect it to be much higher, but around 2 million.
New Mexico: Similar to HI, I'd expect it to have about .5-1 million more people.
Low states I'd expect to be lower:
Kansas: I'd expect it to be similar to Nebraska.
New Hampshire: I would've expected it's population to be swapped with Rhode Island. Not much of a difference, though
The densely populated areas are actually relatively small (most right outside NYC). There are several parts of NJ that have small populations and are very rural.
I still think of Arizona as sparsely populated, when in fact it is now well into the top 20 of U.S. states by population. And heading for the top 10 at the rate it's going.
Maine is a good example of a state that has the image of coastal towns, tourists at the beach, and it does have that... but that's a sliver along the southern part of the state. Most of it is heavy forest.
New York State is an oddity, in my mind. NYC's suburbs seem to go in every direction but the obvious one, upstate (to my mind). What is the explanation for that?
Having lived in Washington, I don't really think of Idaho as a tiny state with little national relevance like (say) Wyoming or the Dakotas. It seems like it should be ~3 million, instead of its actual 1.8 million.
Maybe it's just all the time I've hung out on here, but Boise feels like a pretty nationally relevant city, which seems like it should propel the state a bit higher. It's also that the rural areas around Boise don't fit the stereotypical "two-lane road through the mountains" Western mold, but instead look more like Midwestern farm country --- which creates an impression that the state as a whole is like Wisconsin or Indiana in having a large-ish rural population.
California doesn't feel like 40 million people imo. So much of the state is almost empty, including some long stretches of major highways, e.g. I-5, US-101 between San Jose and San Luis Obispo, CA-1, and US-395. And some of the metros (especially the Bay Area) feel smaller than they are because the mountains force the developed areas to be more condensed. The Bay Area CSA and the Chicago CSA are both ~10 million but the Bay feels more like 6-7 million. The Sacramento MSA and the Portland MSA are both ~2.5 million but the Sac area feels like less than half the size of the Portland area. The state as a whole feels to me like ~25 million, somewhere between Florida and Texas.
The Chicago MSA, not CSA, is 9.5MM. The Bay Area MSA is 4.8 million (which does not include San Jose). That may explain difference in "feel".
The Portland MSA is 400K larger than Sacramento and has been growing faster
Most of the Sun Belt states feel much more populated than they actually are (on paper) due to high volumes of tourists, business travelers (especially in GA and TX), military personnel (and their families), migrant workers (and their families) and part-year residents (e.g., retirees, college students, celebrities, professional athletes, etc.).
As the 9th most populated state, North Carolina feels less populated than it is if you're traveling through it north-south on I-95. Most municipalities off that highway in the state have populations of less than 60,000 (often much less than that), except for Fayetteville, which I-95 barely skirts into city limits and seems rather barren as a result. And given that it has five exits, casual tourists may think that Lumberton is a big metropolis when in fact it's less than 20,000.
A similar effect although less pronounced can happen if you go east-west on I-40. Yes, you have Asheville, the Triad (Winston-Salem, High Point and Greensboro), the Triangle (Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh) and Wilmington along the route, but they're spread out at least an hour apart on the 420-mile highway, and much of what is between them is sparsely populated, particularly between where I-40 hits I-95 and Wilmington.
Among all interstates in North Carolina, I-85 gives the best impression of the state's population size, as it goes through north Durham, western and southern Greensboro and a good chunk of Charlotte and is fairly busy except for the interminable, near-barren hourlong stretch from Durham to the North Carolina-Virginia border.
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