As the United States approaches its 250 th anniversary amid deep political division, a major new bipartisan report aims to get consensus on a fundamental question: How are we really doing as a country?
The new “State of the States” report , released by the State of the Nation Project at Tulane University, analyzed more than three decades of data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, to provide a long-term progress report for each state.
Drawing on more than 4,000 indicators, researchers ranked states across 31 measures covering life satisfaction, trust in their neighbors and institutions, civil liberties, education, environment, children and families, economy, workforce, physical and mental health, inequality and more.
“At a time of such polarization, misinformation, and pessimism, it’s important to get a clear sense of how we’re really doing on what matters most. It turns out that states—red and blue—mostly share the same struggles,” said Douglas Harris , director of the State of the Nation Project and an economics professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane. “This is the first report of its kind to examine not only economic outcomes but social, civic and personal outcomes by state.”
The bipartisan group behind the report includes researchers and policy experts from seven of the nation’s leading think tanks across the political spectrum as well as advisors to the past five U.S. presidents, Democrats and Republicans. The project builds on the original State of the Nation report released in 2025, which examined how the United States compares with other countries on similar measures. This new report shifts the focus inward, analyzing how those trends are playing out across states.
The report found significant regional divides. States in the western Midwest and New England generally ranked highest overall in the most recent year across the measures examined, while Southern states ranked near the bottom. Minnesota had the strongest average ranking across all measures, while Louisiana ranked last.
Southern states ranked in the middle on personal well-being but especially low on trust in institutions. Many of those trust measures pertain to government institutions, suggesting that Southern states show low levels of trust even in their own state and local governments. Mountain states, meanwhile, had high levels of trust but the lowest levels of personal well-being.
One of the report’s central findings is that most states are moving in the same direction in key areas, but often in troubling ways. The report found that no state is improving on the following eight measures: life satisfaction, adult depression, youth depression, fatal overdoses, trust in the federal government, income inequality, long-term unemployment rate and hourly earnings growth. A bright spot is that every state has been improving on two measures: child mortality and total real state income.
While states are mostly becoming more alike, they are growing further apart in two key areas — and some states are falling behind much faster than others. Economic gaps between states are widening as measured by income levels and hourly earnings. Well-being gaps are also rising in measures like trust in other people, trust in science, rates of depression, suicide and overdoses.
“While all states are struggling with mental health, some states are getting hit harder than others,” said Anna Lembke , a leading psychiatrist at Stanford University and co-author of the report.
The report found an increasingly unhappy nation. Across the country, people are reporting that they feel worse about their lives, more isolated, less trusting and more mentally distressed. Of 225 possible opportunities for states to show improvement on six self-reported well-being measures, the researchers found only 12 cases of improvement.
One of the main findings in the original State of the Nation report, highlighted by The New York Times , was that America’s economic strength has not translated into higher average levels of well-being. The new report shows that this is true across states as well. States with higher personal incomes per capita were not doing better on measures of personal well-being — life satisfaction or depression.
The State of the States report, funded by Tulane and the university’s Murphy Institute, is the first to examine such a wide range of measures at the state level.
“It’s not easy to capture how states are doing. 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,” said Frederick Hess , a political scientist and education expert at the American Enterprise Institute.
By comparing long-term trends across the country, the project aims to help policymakers, civic leaders and residents see what’s happening in their own states and learn from others. “At the state level, we encourage you to ask, where is my state excelling and failing?” the authors wrote. “What is different about my state that might explain such successes and failures? … This is how we see the path from data to real solutions.”
The report does not prescribe specific policy solutions. Instead, the authors say their goal is to establish a shared set of facts at a time when Americans increasingly disagree not only about politics, but about the condition of the country itself. “We have to first ask, how are we doing? Then, we can move on to, how do we get better?” the authors wrote.
The full report and state-by-state findings are available at https://stateofnation.org .
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