Red States and Blue States Are Becoming the Same Unhappy Country

Pull up the most recent data on how Americans rate their own lives, and a strange thing happens to the political map. The reds and the blues, the coasts and the heartland, the places that cannot agree on anything: line up their life satisfaction, their depression rates, their trust in the people next door, and the differences start to blur. Nearly everyone is doing worse. And nearly everyone is doing worse in roughly the same direction.

That, in a sentence, is the uncomfortable headline of the new State of the States report from the State of the Nation Project at Tulane University, released this week as the country edges up on its 250th birthday. It is not the story most of us expect about a polarized America.

The numbers behind it are enormous. Researchers pulled together more than three decades of data, from 1990 to 2024, across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and ranked them on 31 separate measures, things like life satisfaction, trust in institutions, civil liberties, education, the environment, physical and mental health, inequality. More than 4,000 indicators in all. The point was to answer one deceptively simple question that the authors keep returning to: how are we actually doing?

The answer depends a great deal on where you stand. Minnesota came out on top with the strongest average ranking across every measure. Louisiana came in last. New England and the western Midwest clustered near the top; the three Southern census divisions sat at the bottom.

The Same Direction, Mostly Downhill

But the ranking, the part that lends itself to a tidy map, is almost the least interesting thing here. What unsettles is the direction of travel. For most of the measures showing a national decline, nearly every state is sliding the same way at once. No state is improving on adult depression. None on youth depression. None on life satisfaction, fatal overdoses, income inequality, or trust in the federal government. Eight measures, and on every one of them, the entire country is moving backward together.

“While all states are struggling with mental health, some states are getting hit harder than others,” says Anna Lembke, the Stanford psychiatrist who co-authored the report. That last clause matters. Because alongside the grim uniformity runs a second, quieter trend: on the measures that touch well-being most directly, states are not just declining, they are pulling apart from one another. Some are sinking fast. Others slowly. The gap widens.

There is a bright side, sort of, and it is worth saying plainly. Every single state has improved on two things over the long run: child mortality has fallen, and total real state income has climbed. Kids are surviving childhood at higher rates everywhere, and the economy, by the crude measure of dollars, keeps growing. Which makes the rest of the picture all the more puzzling.

The Money Doesn’t Buy What You’d Think

Here is the puzzle. If incomes are rising in every state, why is hardly anyone happier? The researchers went looking for the link and mostly couldn’t find it. Of 225 chances for a state to show improvement on a self-reported well-being measure, they counted just 12 cases where things actually got better. When they folded in overdoses and suicides, the picture darkened further still: 96 per cent of cases worsening, with a lone exception (Washington, DC, on suicide). And when they lined up income per capita against the personal measures, life satisfaction, adult depression, youth depression, the correlation simply wasn’t there. More money in the state, no measurable lift in how people felt about their lives.

Curiously, money did seem to track with something. Wealthier states tended to score better on social trust, the trust people place in institutions, in science, in one another. Not personal contentment, but the social fabric. The authors are careful not to overclaim which way the arrow points; well-functioning institutions might fuel a strong economy, or a strong economy might make institutions look like they’re working. Either reading is plausible. We don’t yet know.

What gives the project its odd authority is who built it. This is not a partisan broadside. The board behind the report draws on seven of the country’s leading think tanks from across the political spectrum, plus advisors to the last five presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike, Clinton through Trump. They are unpaid volunteers, and they agreed. “It’s not easy to capture how states are doing,” says Frederick Hess, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the authors. “This endeavor brought together a healthy mix of expertise and perspective, yet wound up with a remarkable degree of consensus as to what measures are most fundamental.” A group assembled precisely because its members disagree, finding common ground on the diagnosis if not the cure.

Douglas Harris, the Tulane economist who directs the project, frames the whole effort as a kind of shared mirror. At a time of polarization and pessimism, he argues, it matters to get a clear sense of how the country is really doing, and the surprise is that states red and blue mostly share the same struggles. The report stops there, deliberately. It prescribes no policy, names no villain. The authors say their job is only to establish a set of facts everyone can stand on before the arguing starts.

Maybe that’s the real provocation buried in 4,000 indicators. We spend a great deal of energy convinced that the country has split into two nations who want opposite things and live opposite lives. The data suggests something stranger and harder to fit on a yard sign: that we are, increasingly, the same anxious, distrustful, materially-richer-but-no-happier place, just arguing about it from different rooms. The question the authors leave hanging is the one worth sitting with. If the trouble is shared, what would it take to notice?

The full report and state-by-state findings are available at stateofnation.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it true that red states and blue states are actually becoming more alike?

On most measures, yes. The Tulane analysis found states converging on 17 of the indicators it tracked and diverging on only 13, even as national political rhetoric grows more divided. The catch is that several of the measures pulling states apart are the ones tied most closely to well-being, which may be feeding the sense of division more than the underlying data warrants.

Why doesn’t rising income make people in wealthier states happier?

That is exactly the disconnect the report highlights, and the authors don’t claim to fully explain it. Across 225 opportunities for states to improve on self-reported well-being, only 12 actually did, despite incomes climbing nearly everywhere. Money did track with stronger social trust, but not with personal life satisfaction, which suggests whatever drives contentment runs deeper than the size of a paycheck.

How can a bipartisan group agree on something this politically charged?

The board was deliberately built from people who disagree, drawing on seven think tanks across the political spectrum and advisors to the last five presidents of both parties. They didn’t have to agree on solutions, only on which measures matter and what the data shows. The fact that such a group reached consensus on the diagnosis is, the authors argue, a small sign the country is less divided than it feels.

What’s stopping the report from telling states how to fix any of this?

That’s by design rather than oversight. The authors set out to establish a shared set of facts first, on the logic that you can’t agree on how to get better until you agree on how you’re doing. Specific remedies are left to state organizations and policymakers, who can dig into each state’s individual report to see where it leads or lags its neighbors.