I love to rank things, so I’ve put some thought into how I would rank the 50 states from best to worst. I was also pretty curious about how that compared to other rankings from two additional sources with pretty robust methodologies (even though mine is of course vibe based haha). These sources are Geography King on YouTube (super fun nerdy channel) and the US News & World Report. I wanted to not only compare and contrast my list with both of theirs, but to see what our combined ranking would look like if we averaged the results of our lists together into a “master” list. Another fun wrinkle is that I think we fall into three different camps ideologically: progressive (me), centrist (Geography King) and center right (US News). So this puts somewhat of a constraint on the implicit “biases” of each list. I’d be interested in what you all think of these maps!
Photo 1: “master ranking” that combines/averages all three lists
Photo 2: my map/ranking
Photo 3: Geography King’s map
Photo 4: US News’s map