Minnesota tops the nation

To hear certain people talk, one might think of Minnesota as a state in crisis. Too many taxes. Too much government. A business climate hostile to growth. A welfare state run amok. If you’ve spent any time listening to the state’s critics — and there’s never a shortage of them come election season — you’d be forgiven for thinking Minnesota is somewhere between California and Venezuela on the spectrum of mismanaged states.
That’s just politics … as opposed to the actual data based on real world measures of success, which tell a very different story about the North Star state.
A new report from the State of the Nation Project — a bipartisan group of scholars drawn from institutions across the political spectrum, from the American Enterprise Institute to the Brookings Institution— ranks Minnesota first in the nation overall. Out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, assessed on 31 measures spanning 14 topic areas, Minnesota rates the best. It’s not a partisan document from the Republican National Committee. It’s not a press release from the governor’s office. It’s the kind of careful, nonpartisan analysis that tends to get ignored precisely because it doesn’t fit anyone’s preferred narrative.
The rankings cover a wide range of measures that matter to ordinary people.
Minnesota ranks second in voter participation — a reflection of a civic culture that takes democracy seriously. It ranks third in both employment-to-population ratio and labor force participation, meaning Minnesotans are working, and working at rates that almost no other state can match.
The state ranks fourth in volunteerism and fourth in young adults who are either employed or in school — a measure of whether the next generation is engaged and connected to opportunity. On poverty, Minnesota ranks fourth in the nation, with a trend that is actually improving relative to the national average.

Income inequality? Minnesota ranks 11th and its ranking is likely to improve as inequality is increasing more slowly than in most of the rest of the country.
These are not the hallmarks of a failing state. These are the hallmarks of a state that, by most objective measures, is doing something right.
And yet the political attacks keep coming. Minnesota’s progressive tax structure is routinely characterized as job-killing and growth-stunting. The state’s investment in public services is framed as waste and overreach. Critics have spent years insisting that businesses are fleeing, that the middle class is being squeezed dry, and that the whole enterprise of Minnesota governance is a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation.
The report’s economic findings are worth sitting with for a moment. Minnesota ranks 17th in labor productivity and 20th in economic output — solid, if not spectacular, marks for a state of its size. Both productivity and economic output are improving. The critics who insist that Minnesota’s tax and spending policies are strangling the economy have some explaining to do when confronted with a state that ranks in the top three nationally for workforce participation and near the top for poverty reduction. An economy that puts people to work and keeps them out of poverty is, by any reasonable definition, functioning well.
That said, the report is not a clean bill of health. Minnesota’s struggles with mental health are real and demand attention. The state ranks 43rd in youth depression — a concerning number — and the trend is worsening faster than the national average. Adult depression, fatal overdoses, and suicide rates are all moving in the wrong direction. These are not problems unique to Minnesota, but the state’s standing on youth mental health in particular should prompt serious conversation about what’s happening to young people here, and why a state that ranks first overall is failing its kids on this critical measure.
The fuller picture that emerges from this report is of a state with genuine, durable strengths built over generations — in civic engagement, in workforce development, in keeping people employed and out of poverty — that is also grappling with the same corrosive forces of mental health decline and social fragmentation affecting the entire country.
What the report does not support is the portrait of Minnesota as a failed experiment in progressive governance. That’s the same kind of hyperbole that we’ve seen on the subject of Medicaid fraud in the state. The data simply don’t bear that out. Minnesota is, by the most rigorous nonpartisan accounting available, the best-performing state in the nation.
That’s a fact worth remembering the next time someone tells you otherwise.