NPR : Job Interviews Get Creative:

QUESTION 3: If you could remove any of the 50 states, which would it be? Be prepared to give specific reasons why you chose the state you did.

I think the analysis they offer is missing an option:

Case (f) is that the state is absorbed into another. In this case, my non-partisan choice is Rhode Island. Since one can throw a baseball from one end to the other, it really shouldn’t exist as a state. My partisan choice is one of those states that has voted Republican consistently and with large majorities over the past 20 years.