There are rankings and there are rankings that cause Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas to write “GARBAGE LIST” in all capitals on social media, and CNBC’s 2026 ‘America’s Top States for Business’ quality-of-life rankings are the second kind, having placed all 10 of its worst states in Republican-led territory while the Census Bureau’s own data shows some of those same states are where Americans are choosing to move in the largest numbers.
CNBC ranked the 10 worst states to live in as, counting from 10th to worst: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Missouri, Utah, Georgia, Louisiana, Indiana, Texas, and Tennessee, per Fox News’s coverage of the list today. All 10 states voted for Trump in 2024. All 10 are Republican-led. California and New York, which have the highest state income taxes in the country, the highest cost of living outside of Hawaii, and recent histories of population decline, did not appear on the list at any position, which conservative commentator Reverend Jordan Wells described on X as “pure comedy” and which is also a defensible description of a methodology that produces a list where people are fleeing from the absent states and moving to the listed ones.
CNBC’s methodology, which the outlet describes as emphasizing “Quality of Life” including factors such as access to LGBTQ-friendly policies, healthcare rankings, and environmental protections, gave Tennessee a poor score partly for its “bathroom law” requiring transgender individuals to use facilities corresponding with their biological sex at birth. Tennessee added over 42,000 net new residents in the most recent Census period, making it one of the top 10 states for population growth, which is the metric that measures where people actually choose to live when they can choose, rather than where a methodology determines they should prefer to live. Texas added over 67,000 net new residents in the same period. Texas is the second-worst state on the CNBC list.
“This is correct. Please believe this. Tennessee is HORRIBLE. You definitely shouldn’t move here,” conservative Newsmax contributor Chrissy Clark wrote, correctly identifying the gap between the ranking’s premise and the data it ignores. Conservative activist Robby Starbuck, a Tennessee resident, wrote: “It’s all predicated on far left BS. Our states all gained population while YOUR state lost a record amount.” He is correct about the population trends and somewhat less correct about what “far left BS” means as a methodological critique, since CNBC’s criteria are published and reviewable, which is more than can be said for most ideological complaints about media bias.
CNBC has been publishing these state rankings since 2007. Every year the methodology produces a list that conservatives describe as biased and liberals describe as accurate, and every year Americans continue moving to the states CNBC ranks as the worst places to live, which is a mystery that neither side has fully resolved.
When the methodology ranks as worst to live in the states where the most people are choosing to move, what exactly is the methodology measuring?
Sources
Fox News: CNBC survey mocked for ranking red states as worst places to live
