The states CNBC ranked highest for "quality of life" lost a combined 57,641 residents to domestic migration in 2024-2025, while the bottom 10 states gained 211,511 people, according to an analysis published last week by the Center of the American Experiment. The report argues that CNBC's rankings, which placed Minnesota fifth nationally for business and high for quality of life, fail a basic credibility test: people are moving in the opposite direction of what the rankings suggest.
The analysis examined Census Bureau domestic migration data for 2024-2025 against CNBC's 2026 "Quality of Life" rankings. The report found a negative and statistically significant relationship between a state's quality of life ranking and its rate of domestic in-migration per 1,000 residents: states with lower CNBC rankings actually saw higher rates of people moving in. The bottom 10 states gained nearly four times as many residents as the top 10 lost. CNBC's quality of life category weighs factors including crime rates, environmental quality, healthcare, childcare availability, worker protections like paid leave and organizing rights, anti-discrimination laws, voting rights, and reproductive rights, assigning 290 points out of 2,500 total in its business rankings.
"People, it would seem, are fleeing states with higher qualities of life for states with lower ones," economist John Phelan writes in the report. "Does that make sense?" The analysis also notes that CNBC's "Top States for Business" rankings aren't correlated in any meaningful way with what businesses actually do, such as start themselves or hire people. Governor Tim Walz celebrated Minnesota's fifth-place business ranking on social media July 11, calling the state a top choice for industries from healthcare to renewable energy and manufacturing.
The report argues that CNBC's quality of life ranking essentially measures how liberal or progressive a state's policies are, and the Census data show Americans are voting with their feet against that model. Phelan writes that if you accept CNBC's ranking as a proxy for policy liberalism, the migration patterns reveal that "Americans simply don't share CNBC's preferences." The population drain from blue states will become a political problem too, the report warns, as congressional representation and electoral votes shift with the census. The bottom line: rankings that ignore where people and businesses actually go aren't measuring what they claim to measure.