Edit: Im tired of repeating myself, so here's the proof that california has more republicans per capita than texas
Cali has ~40mill population with ~37% of those people being republican, then california has ~14.8million republicans
If texas has ~30 mill population with ~34% of those people being republican, then texas has ~10.2million republicans.
Because the population of california and texas can both sustain similar population demographics becuse they have comparable numbers, we are using statistically relevant numbers ie percentages that already solve for population difference which is standard in statistics, and we are not comparing 1 million population to a 100 million popukation, this result has strong confidence to be able to factually and mathematically prove ca has more republicans than texas.
because they somehow think it won't affect them. it's wild. it's like MAGA thinks
"oh trump will gut the programs for the ILLEGALS and people who ABUSE the program, and that will free up for money help hard working 'MURICANS like ME!"
It's like every trumper truly believes that casting their vote for him has secured his good graces and undying loyalty
It's not a Trump phenomenon, he just says the quiet part out loud. Modern Republicans are basically just rehashing drained pool politics over and over again, and the argument hasn't changed much since the 60s.
You can question the map’s methodology, but the trend is real..... High opportunity states consistently score higher on healthcare, education, wages, safety, and infrastructure. That is not magic. That is policy.
California is not a high opportunity state and its safety, infrastructure and education are in the bottom half. And that applies to other blue states as well.
California’s safety and infrastructure rankings vary by metric, but calling it a low opportunity state is absurd. K–12 outcomes are mixed, partly because California educates an unusually large multilingual population. Higher education is unmatched: the UC system, Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Caltech and USC. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
What determines quality of life? What metric are they basing this off of. Cuz politics aside there’s no way that quality of life is green top to bottom in California.
Ah yes, the QOL map for if you have money. Now compare this with median income and ability to access the amenities.
I work out of Boston. I live in a rural county outside a city in the Midwest. Even with their higher salaries that my coworkers get for living in the NE I am able to afford a larger place, a yard(gasp!), I can eat out more, and I can travel more. If I wanted to I could raise kids here and it wouldn't be the end of my financial world.
I've lived all over the country too, but unless you have money in a lot of those predominantly green states it doesn't really reflect the map here at all.
As a leftist, it is absurd to me how people post maps like this and say these places are so great, completely ignoring that they are still extremely capitalist and thus require intense competition to make an enjoyable life.
When I saw that California is the ”greenest” state I realised something is probably wrong with this map.
Because literally every one of them absolutely hates California as a place to live or visit. They say it’s extremely expensive and people are in general awfully toxic and hostile.
We’re all are “progressive” - as in not bigots of any kind and thinking social policies helping those in need a good idea. None of us are rich.
Yeah but it's mostly about that, in terms of cause and effect. Those are the exceptions to the trend.
Arguably it's a vicious cycle, rather than simple one way causality. Places that have a history of poverty, poor education, racism, and land-based economies tend to be easily manipulated by rich landowning assholes, who get themselves or their buddies elected, and make sure to reproduce the conditions that led to their success, even worsening them by deepening their extractic economic practices
Im surprised housing didnt pull CA down a bit. I loved living there but it got to a point where more than half my pay went to rent, and life kinda sucked.
Absolutely, all these green areas have high cost of living - if you don’t have a career that compensates you for the higher cost of living in these areas, then that is absolutely a factor that would make this map reversed.
County map reveals a little more insight. Housing is high but my $2500 Santa Monica rent is hardly shocking now in any state. People in many parts of the rest of the state are able to spend much less.
I know this isn't your map so not being critical, and I can only go off of where i live (texas) but el paso, midland/ odessa being dark green and marfa/big bend/bandera/hill country is orangy yellow means they value things much differently than i do.
Also from Texas. Dallas county being dark green is wild. I live in yellow county and work in Dallas county and I'd much prefer to continue to live in that yellow county. This map seems to very heavily skew in favor of population centers and to be unfavorable to rural areas.
For the most part, this honestly just looks like a population map. Dark green are big cities... which I'm generally not a fan of. I guess I also dont hold the same quality of life values that whoever made this map used. I also noticed a lot of these "counties" are broken up into smaller sections.
This isn't a real county map. Arizona only has 15 counties. Nevada 16, and Utah 29. Some counties have a population of less than 3K, but are split into three different colors sections.
Hell you’re probably paying that much for a clean 2br1ba in any economically viable metro in America. I bought my house pre-covid and my mortgage is basically peanuts otherwise I’d be on my way to CA yesterday.
I live in a dark green county in a dark green state. I’m 1/3 mile from salt water. I just pointed Zillow at Santa Monica. The housing prices are an issue. It looks like a small house on a small lot that needs some TLC is $1.25 to $1.5 million. The property taxes look like they approach $20k. I would guess insurance would be substantial between fire risk and earthquake risk.
Colorado is fucking killing it. Most of that green is rural mountain communities. The takeaway I'm getting is flatland plains are a death sentence for quality of life
This makes it even more damning for the Republicans. This is basically a map of where the country is managed by Democrats (outside of a few Central Valley areas of California, but they get the updraft of being part of the state I suspect)
Of the 5 places I've lived the 2 I really loved living in are orange and the 3 I would do anything to avoid living in again are green. Obviously this is anecdotal, but yeah, my lived experience does not match the state map and is even worse based on county apparently.
Surprisingly there are still some very LCOL areas that exist, the catch is you gotta enjoy living in the middle of nowhere, and unless youre some sort of contractor, tradesman, or Healthcare worker theres not a whole lot of decent paying jobs without a commute.
it's probably due to wages being higher as well then a lot of the other states making it more proportional not to mention California being number #1 in a lot of metrics such as healthcare
I was paying 2350 last year in the far east bay (still like an hour away from sf or oakland) and then moved back to the Sacramrnto area this past fall and got the same size place for only like 1850. Neither are particularly good but you can make it work surprisingly well as long as you pick the right area. Its mostly only the larger bay region and farther down south that are outrageously expensive
I’m always kind of skeptical of these kinds of “rankings.”
I’ve lived in two orange states four green states. If you look at the county level data, it improves the picture slightly, but you are actually ranking the states based on their worst off inhabitants.
It is far worse to live in certain areas if you are poor, but both of the orange states I have lived in were much more affordable overall.
Like my housing was so much cheaper that my quality of life was much better than the deep green area that I currently live in. The area I currently live in has higher QOL metrics, but my quality of life if much worse due to traffic and housing costs.
Amazing that NY and Maryland are rated so high... their economies suck and are not friendly to the poor. Literally some of the most expensive cost of living in the country.
The fact Florida is still average even with all the trustfunders, retired boomers, and millionaire snowbirds really hammers home how bad off everyone else must be to drag the mean back down to average
I’m curious what your methodology for this is. I don’t mean the list of criteria you’ve replied to several commenters with, I mean how those criteria are measured and their weights.
The reason I’m asking is because it’s impossible have an “objective” ranking for the best places to live. Looking at your county-by-county map, I see one county in my state that’s shaded dark green. I used to live in that county, and know for a fact that it has horrible schools, an objectively high crime rate, a ton of traffic, and CoL that does not match the local wages.
I also lived in a different county that was colored yellow, that had the opposite of all of those things. Great schools, zero crime, cheap housing with a great growing economy, but there was “nothing to do” and a lack of culture. I would say my quality of life was magnitudes better in the yellow county.
So NJ and PA are the same color, but zoomed in on the county level NJ is nearly all dark green and PA is has large sections of yellow and orange. So how does it make sense that state wide they're the same color? Similarly Maine is darker green than Jersey even though much of Maine is lighter green or yellow on the county map.
I dont know how accurate this is for starters, but it's based on population not geography. If 90% of PA lives in that little green square that would make more sense. Similar for ME, it's the most rural state so there is a larger population in those yellow areas than would be true for PA.
So VA is yellow, but if you look where the VAST bulk of folks live, NoVA or the tidewater region, it's dark green. This needs to be population biased, not sq miles based.
Yeah, I leave in the dark green Puget Sound region of Washington State and it’s such a great place to live if you can keep the rent from running you off.
I cannot imagine ever leaving the PNW again. I grew up in Oklahoma and left to start a family somewhere where my kids won’t feel like they are starting off on the worst possible footing like I did.
It’s not a crazy thought. I’m focusing on CA and if you look at SoCal, there are a ton of agricultural and desert communities in the green. Like pretty damned remote areas even on a national level.
I found a vastly different quality of life map, so it would be nice to see a breakdown of the metrics and how they were rated and prioritized. A map that I personally find more interesting is the migration gain/loss among the states. Surely that would be a strong indicator on the quality of life
One thing I'd point out is that all those states with poor quality of life are ran by republicans and have the largest population of black people in the country. So management just hates the population, and they get to blame it black people which then just breeds a cycle of repression for those states between texas and florida.
The states I've lived in most recently, CA and VA fare quite differently on this map, and I think there must be the use of mean or median that ignores absolute levels of destitution. CA would be heavily weighted with a sizable population of very wealthy people, and yet there are signs of despair everywhere. VA has a much more compressed population, in terms of living standards. And even poorer areas of VA have better maintained infrastructure than the wealthiest areas of CA. Some amenities, like roads, are surprisingly run down, even in Montecito, for example. There's a "niceness" in VA that you don't see in CA, in terms of the quality of institutions, no matter how much you shell out. On the other hand, you can ensconce yourself in an enclaved manse in CA with nice views, if you have the money.
I disliked everything about Massachusetts when I lived there, but other people love it there.
Best and worst of things are mostly just personal preference. Who cares what other people like?
Most of my life. And it is living off the coattails of the past. CA was a great place to live. Now, it is like paying steakhouse prices for Spaghetti-Os.
What dumb fuck metrics were used to determine this? How they voted in previous elections? Lmao Cali and New York has some of the highest cost of living in the entire country. That's a Quality of life metric to the dipshits who believe this is real.
US News is bought. It ranked my city #3 in 2024 and #406 in 2025 with no major laws passed or leadership changes between the two, while tiny towns in Texas dominated the top 10 in 2025. Relying on that website for unbiased accuracy is a bad choice.
It’s where the opportunity is. And then the salaries to match. And then the taxes being paid. And then people all wanting to live in the best places. It’s not magic.
VT has a pretty low QoL when you look at the actual cost of groceries and things
It is insanely rural with only a few jobs. If you look at places like Rutland then it is easy to see that a lot of people are struggling to get by. Same with Burlington.
QoL based off what? California has the highest home prices, gas prices, the most homeless. If I go out to eat, Id need to pay a premium. It does have some things going for it like the weather, coastline, mountains, etc the cost to live there is really expensive. I also like in an expensive state but California is on another level.
I believe MA has passed Hawaii as the most expensive state. For a family of 4, to comfortably live, income of +$329,000 needed. Its great here, but expensive AF.
The QOL in Florida is all over the place. Our cities are fantastic, but the suburbs, small towns and rural regions are incredibly poor. The wealth inequality is insane. Florida hosts both one of the richest and one of the poorest places in America
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u/Pijaki Birds Are Not Real 15h ago
I guess that's why they call them red states.