I’ve written before about our local DFLers fondness for trumpeting some of the various rankings of states compiled as clickbait by various bloggers and passed off as “studies.” “Data is rarely kind to the American left,” I wrote a couple of years ago:
The reason these rankings are created and trumpeted so loudly is that they give “progressives” something other than data to point to. Faced with relatively sluggish economies and population loss, they can point to rankings like CNBC’s for comfort.
They function as a sort of alternate reality where “Blue State” policies are working.
U.S. News and World Report‘s Best States 2025
One of the red letters days in the DFL’s social media calendar is usually the release by U.S. News and World Report of its “Best States” rankings. Released this week, the reaction to 2025’s has been surprisingly muted.
On one level this is surprising. Overall, Minnesota ranked a healthy 4th out of 50 states. On the eight subindexes, it ranked in the top ten on two – Infrastructure (10th) and Opportunity (7th) – and in the top twenty for seven. Plenty for the state’s Babbitts to crow about here, surely?
Perhaps this new found reticence stems from the direction of travel. U.S. News and World Report has been compiling these rankings since 2017. In that time, Minnesota has bumped down from an Overall ranking of 3rd, nothing catastrophic there. But if we look at the change in rankings of the subindices over this time, a couple of alarm bells might ring.
There are five subindices which are the same in 2017 and 2025. Figure 1 shows how Minnesota’s ranking has changed on each of these and Overall over this period. We see little or no change for two, Crime & Corrections and Education, but steep falls for another two: Minnesota’s ranking for Health Care is down thirteen spots from 3rd out of fifty states in 2017 to 16th in 2025, and its Economy ranking is down sixteen spots from 12th to 28th.
Figure 1: Change in U.S. News and World Report Best States subindices, 2017 to 2025
Source: U.S. News and World Report and Center of the American Experiment
Figure 2 shows how Minnesota’s rankings on these two subindices, Economy and Health Care, have changed within that time span. For Health Care, we see the ranking drop from 2017 to 2021, since when it has stabilized. For the Economy, it dropped from 2017 to 2018, stabilized, then dropped sharply again after 2023 (I have ‘interpolated’ for 2020 and 2022, as the rankings do not appear to have been produced in those years).
Figure 2: U.S. News and World Report rankings
Source: U.S. News and World Report and Center of the American Experiment
As always, take these rankings with a pretty hefty helping of salt. Contra our local DFLers, they are no substitute for data.