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Tuesday, 30 September 2025
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Written by John Hood
What is the most popular state in the continental United States? You guessed it: our own North Carolina.
That’s the headline from a recent YouGov survey of more than 2,000 American adults. Asked whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, 68% of respondents expressed a favorable view of Hawaii. The second-highest favorability rating was North Carolina’s 62%, followed by Alaska (61%), Tennessee (60%), and Colorado (59%).
Of course, to say North Carolina is a highly regarded state is not to say it is equally popular across subgroups of respondents. As you might expect to see within today’s political context, assessments differ sharply by partisan affiliation.
The share of Democrats with a favorable view of California (86%) was far higher than the share of Republicans who view it favorably (23%). On the flipside, Florida was viewed favorably by 83% of Republicans and 36% of Democrats. One reason the Tar Heel State fared so well in the rankings is that the partisan spread isn’t so huge, with 73% of Republicans and 59% of Democrats expressing a favorable view.
Could this be in part because of divided government? For most of the past 15 years, Democrats have held our governorship and Republicans have controlled our state legislature. Perhaps that gives voters in both partisan coalitions a sense of empowerment. As it happens, other states with divided government also exhibited relatively modest gaps in partisan favorably, including Arizona (64% among Republicans, 57% among Democrats), Pennsylvania (52% and 66% respectively), Wisconsin (53% and 57%), and Virginia (61% and 62%).
This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, however. Kentucky and Michigan also feature divided government, but much larger partisan gaps in favorability.
Other drivers of North Carolina’s national popularity are surely our strong job growth and (relatively) modest cost of living. I don’t necessarily mean that poll respondents are intimately familiar with economic statistics. But plenty of Americans know personally or have heard about people moving to North Carolina to better their economic prospects. They sense, correctly, that our state is on the upswing. Last year, only Texas experienced more net domestic migration (+85,267) than did North Carolina (+82,288).
Yet another factor is aesthetics. Hawaii and Alaska aren’t economic powerhouses, actually, yet they earn high favorability for their natural beauty and recreational opportunities. North Carolina, Tennessee, and Colorado have the good fortune to be attractive to both visitors and job seekers.
While our beaches, mountains, and resort communities make a great impression, our “charm advantage” is broader than that. In a related survey, YouGov asked a favorability question about America’s 50 largest cities. When respondents were limited to assessing only the cities they’d personally visited, the one with the highest net favorability was Raleigh, at +73%. Colorado Springs (+69%), San Antonio (+69%), Virginia Beach (+66%), Charlotte (+65%), and Nashville (+65%) formed the rest of the top tier.
The cities with the worst net-favorability ratings among those who’ve visited them included Baltimore (+6%), Fresno (+2%), Oakland (-4%), Detroit (-5%), and Bakersfield (-10%).
I sometimes hear my fellow North Carolina natives grumble about culture clashes, congestion, and other growth-related challenges. I remind them of two facts. First, while we continue to import lots of people every year, the share of domestic newcomers to longtime residents hasn’t changed as much as you’d think. This is a nationwide phenomenon. Contrary to popular impression, today’s Americans are less likely to relocate across state lines than previous generations were.
Second, I point out that for every challenge associated with (relatively) high population growth, there are multiple challenges associated with low growth. Stagnation is nothing to celebrate. And the ultimate resource isn’t oil, or manufacturing capacity, or lovely fall foliage. It’s people.
North Carolina’s in-migration rate is higher than the national median. So is our fertility rate. We should aspire to do even better, to make our state the most popular place to live, work, get married, and have children. The more the merrier!
Editor’s Note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
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Wednesday, 24 September 2025
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Written by John Hood
President Donald Trump has removed the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and appointed an economist from the Heritage Foundation to replace her. A legal exercise of the president’s powers? Absolutely. But the replacement, E.J. Antoni, must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
I hope North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Ted Budd give the matter careful consideration.
The stakes are high. BLS produces crucial data on employment, wages, prices, and productivity. To do so, it relies on monthly surveys of households and of business establishments, as well as other surveys and administrative data from government programs. Other agencies, universities, and private firms also conduct surveys and produce statistics. But few offer the breadth and depth of coverage that BLS does.
Many individuals and institutions rely on the data. Here in North Carolina, for example, fiscal analysts for the state legislature, governor’s office, and local governments use BLS statistics to project public revenues and expenditures. Companies use them to make investment decisions.
The two fields in which I’ve spent most of my career, journalism and policy analysis, also rely heavily on BLS reports. We report on monthly releases of unemployment rates, job counts, and price changes.
We sweep months or years of BLS data into spreadsheets to calculate longer-term trends. Scholars download decades of BLS data to build econometric models and attempt to evaluate changes in public policy.
Even when other entities produce valuable information, they often test its validity by comparing their data to what the BLS reports. For example, recent research by UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and other partners shows that business-formation data collected by the North Carolina Secretary of State represent a reasonably accurate predictor of changes in employment and economic activity.
Why is that important? Because the secretary’s business-formation metric is readily available by county. Employment data (from BLS) and GDP data (from the Bureau of Economic Analysis) have much longer lag times, especially at the county level. This might well represent a handy new tool for assessing economic growth in North Carolina. It is, however, no substitute for monthly BLS reports (and quarterly BEA reports).
To put it bluntly, if large swaths of policymakers, executives, investors, and the general public come to distrust what comes out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that will make it harder to conduct prudent business or have meaningful conversations about economic policy.
I don’t assume that Antoni would manipulate BLS processes in an attempt to concoct a pro-administration spin. But the political circumstances that led to his nomination are worrying. When firing the previous administrator, Trump noted that she had been appointed by Joe Biden and claimed she had “rigged” job numbers to make him and Republicans “look bad.”
Declining response rates to BLS surveys have made the agency’s job more difficult. But as George Mason University economist Vincent Geloso found in a careful analysis of two decades of BLS data, there is no convincing evidence for the bias the president alleged.
Sometimes, BLS has revised job numbers down under Republican administrations. Sometimes it’s done so under Democratic ones.
“The claims that the BLS is systematically partisan and incompetent collapse under scrutiny,” he concluded.
That’s not to say no improvements are possible. Indeed, the new head of BLS ought to consider University of Chicago economist Tomas Philipson’s idea of giving respondents cash incentives to fill out BLS surveys regularly and accurately.
“After all, such incentives are used by the IRS to reduce measurement errors for reporting taxable incomes,” Philipson wrote in National Review. “Paying respondents for their contribution to improve our understanding of the economy, therefore, generates a mutually beneficial exchange, just as wages do for any regular work.”
Perhaps this is the kind of reform that Antoni and the Trump administration have in mind. If so, great.
If they modify the methodology or frequency of BLS reports without clear and convincing explanations, however, they’ll get a lot of blowback — and deserve it.
Editor’s Note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
(Photo: The Postal Square Building in Washington D.C. holds the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)
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