“Survey Says” examines various rankings and dashboards evaluating geographic locations while noting that these scores are best viewed as a mix of astute interpretation and data.
Buzzing: You either love California or you hate it.
Source: That’s what my trusty spreadsheet tells me after analyzing two Clever Real Estate survey questions from a poll of 1,000 Americans asking for their opinions on the quality of life in all 50 states.
Top line
California leads the nation in terms of the “divisiveness gap” — the result of a contradictory and/or illogical distribution of the results of two polls: California came in second place as the “most desirable” state and first place as the “least desirable” state.
Now we can understand some of the reasons for this division by looking at the other states that also got very mixed reviews on these issues. Remember, this is America in 2024 and people are not subtly disagreeing.
The second most divided state by this count is Florida, followed by New York, Texas and Washington. Oddly enough, this top five is split between Reds and Blues, politically speaking.
But the common thread – all of these states are very populous – suggests that with more residents and greater visibility comes a greater divergence of opinion about quality of life.
Conversely, the smallest opinion gaps were seen in five lesser-known Midwestern states: Nebraska, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas and Iowa. (Yes, all are Republican states.)
Note that the most divided states have six times the population of the least divided states. So where you want to live and where you live may be two different places.
Details
How did we get here? Let’s consider the extremes of the poll on the desirability issue.
Let’s start with the “most desirable” states: Florida comes in first, followed by California, Texas, Hawaii and New York. The bottom five are Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
Compare those scores with the ranking of the least desirable states, where California dominates, followed by New York, Alaska, Alabama, Texas and Florida. The lowest scores were found in North Carolina, New Hampshire, Indiana, Montana and Maryland.
In conclusion
Clever Real Estate used those two questions, along with seven other survey questions and census data on migration, to determine the “best state to live”: North Carolina. Next in line were Montana, South Carolina, Maine and Hawaii.
California ranks fourth among states with the lowest quality of life, with only New Jersey, New York and Illinois scoring worse. Arkansas ranks fifth.
Florida is ranked 39th and Texas 40th.
Postscript
Here are California’s results in seven rankings from the survey…
Most Underrated: No. 29 – No. 1 Colorado while Missouri was No. 50.
The friendliest residents: No. 6 – No. 1 Hawaii while Nevada was No. 50.
The craziest residents: No. 1 – No. 2 New York while New Hampshire was No. 50.
The worst landscape: No. 19 – No. 1 Iowa while Hawaii was No. 50.
The rudest residents: No. 3 – No. 1 New York while Nebraska was No. 50.
Most annoying residents: No. 2 – No. 1 New York while Montana was No. 50.
The most pretentious residents: No. 1 – No. 2 New York while Nebraska was No. 50.
Jonathan Lansner is the business columnist for the Southern California News Group. He can be reached at jlansner@scng.com
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