The Land of 10,000 Lakes was named the top state by YouTube channel Geography King.
The account, boasting nearly a quarter-million followers and over 30 million views over the last nine years, Geography King has been a go-to source for geography facts for curious minds. The channel's host, known as the "Kyle" ranked Minnesota as the top-ranked state in the United States in the third installment of his series "Definitive Ranking of the States."
Kyle also shared a five-minute video explaining the state ranking methodology, based on 26 different categories. Twenty of the categories are objective, ranging from economics, taxes, crime, cancer rate, high school graduation rate, house value and agriculture. His sources include official studies and rankings from the U.S. Census Bureau, Department of Agriculture, National Association of Realtors, Centers for Disease Control, World Population Review and the FBI.
Six of the categories are subjective, such as ranking the quality of the state's capital city, climate and scenery. In the third video, Kyle clarifies that the weighing of the rankings was not going to be heavily swayed by the subjective rankings.
Minnesota is the top ten in six categories, including life expectancy (4th), poverty rate and agriculture (5th) and high school diploma percentage (6th). Its most populated cities also received high subjective ratings including Rochester (home of the Mayo Clinic, Duluth (on the shores of the largest fresh-water lake in the the world, Lake Superior) and its capital city, St. Paul. Minnesota was 48th for income tax and 44th for winter climate. Sales tax ranked 34th and property tax at 32nd.
Rounding out the top ten were Massachusetts (2nd), Pennsylvania (3rd), Colorado (4th), and Wisconsin (6).
The most populated state, California, ranked 7th overall.
Illinois (25th) and Arizona (26th) ranked as the most average, as discussed in the second video.
In the first video, he ranked Mississippi as number 50. It ranked in the bottom ten of 13 categories and in the top 10 in for only two. It was ranked worst in GDP per capita, poverty rate, household income, life expectancy and professional colleges. Many of the states in the southeastern U.S. were in the bottom 20, including Louisiana (49), Arkansas (48), Alabama (47), and Oklahoma (46).