Liberal news outlets produce a steady stream of state rankings that are designed to make blue states look good, and red states look bad. These rankings are always based on oddball criteria that have nothing to do with what actually makes a state desirable. CNBC, a left-wing outlet, is an excellent example:
Businesses in top industries, from health care to renewable energy and manufacturing, understand the benefits of investing and growing in Minnesota.
Proud be ranked a top 5 state for business.https://t.co/xGCcdrmIV3
— Governor Tim Walz (@GovTimWalz) July 11, 2026
A top five state for business? That is an utter joke. Minnesota taxes small businesses more heavily than any other state, and businesses are fleeing the state as fast as they can. That is why job creation in Minnesota is less than one-third the national average.
CNBC also ranked the states as “best states to live in.” In CNBC’s view, the best states to live in are all blue, and the worst are all red–including the states to which people are flocking. John Phelan explains:
This ranking is completely bogus. As I noted last week, these rankings of “Top States for Business” are not correlated in any meaningful way with what businesses actually do, such as start themselves or hire people.
CNBC strips out one component of its “Top States for Business” ranking, “Quality of Life,” and bills it as a ranking of “best states to live in.” Let us remind ourselves of what this measures:
As more companies mandate that their employees return to the office, they are also looking for locations that offer the best quality of life. We rate the states on livability factors like per capita crime rates, environmental quality, and healthcare. With studies showing that childcare is one of the main obstacles to employees entering or re-entering the workforce, we consider the availability and affordability of qualified facilities. We look at worker protections, including livable wage policies, paid leave, and rights to organize. We look at inclusiveness in state laws, including protections against discrimination of all kinds, as well as voting rights and secure election systems. And with surveys showing a sizeable percentage of younger workers would not live in a state that bans abortion, we factor reproductive rights in this category as well.
It is, then, a ranking that equates more “liberal” or “progressive” policies with a higher “Quality of Life.”
Completely absurd. Here is the kicker: John did the math, and it turns out that being one of the “best states to live in,” per CNBC, is negatively correlated with people moving there:
We might expect a ranking of state’s “Quality of Life” to be somewhat correlated with where people choose to live. Once again, however, CNBC’s ranking fails this basic test.
Figure 1 shows the relationship between CNBC’s “Quality of Life” rankings for 2026 and a state’s rate of domestic in or out-migration in 2024-2025 per 1,000 of the 2024 population taken from the Census Bureau. Not only is the relationship negative – in that the lower your CNBC “Quality of Life” ranking the higher is your rate of domestic in-migration – but the relationship is statistically significant.
At this point, you really can only laugh. CNBC’s very “worst states to live in,” the bottom of the barrel in their rankings, are Texas and Tennessee–two states to which Americans are moving in droves. Which means that the rankings are utter BS.
But we knew that already. I hazard the guess that not a single American will be fooled into staying in a blue state, or refraining from moving to a red state, by CNBC’s absurd rankings.
