Poll: Washington, D.C. Worst Place In Country, Americans Say

A new poll has found that Americans believe that Washington, D.C., is the worst place to live in the country.

With a sky-high crime rate and the fifth-highest cost of living in the country, people surveyed by YouGov put the nation’s capital at the bottom.

“We asked people to choose the better of two states in a series of head-to-head matchups. States are rated based on their ‘win percentage,’ that is: how often that state won the head-to-head matchup when it was one of the two states shown,” said the pollster.

Hawaii took the top spot by winning 69% of its matchups and Colorado took second place with 65% of matches won. Virginia (64%) came in third while Nevada took the fourth-favorite spot (61%), followed by North Carolina.

Florida came in sixth with a 61% win-rate, followed by Arizona (60%) at seventh, New York (59%) at eighth. In ninth and tenth place were Georgia (58%) and Texas (58%), respectively.

“The two lowest-rated states were Alabama (38%) and Mississippi (38%), which often rank low in other assessments of income and health care access. Both are Southern states, and in fact almost all the bottom ten states are situated in either the South, with Arkansas (39%) and Kentucky (42%) joining Alabama and Mississippi close to the bottom, or Midwest, including Iowa (39%), Indiana (40%), South Dakota (40%), Missouri (42%), and Kansas (42%),” the pollster wrote.

D.C. came in last place, winning just over a third of its match-ups.

“Washington, D.C., which was also included in the survey, scores worst of all, winning only 35% of its matchups. Americans might be rejecting the political divisiveness it stands for—or could be protesting that it is, in fairness, not a state (despite efforts to change that),” the pollsters wrote.

The poll surveyed 1,211 people between March 12 and March 15. The margin of error is plus or minus 5.4 percentage points.

In another survey, Canada was selected as the best country in which to live.

“The North American country ranked first in both the Quality of Life and Social Purpose subrankings, meaning that it is seen as a stable and safe society in which individuals can develop and prosper, and is open, fair and equitable,” according to U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings released on Tuesday. “Most of the countries that ranked highest for 2021 come from Western Europe. But Australia, New Zealand and Japan – which is ranked No. 2 overall – also appeared in the top 10.”

The U.S. came in sixth.

“The United States, coming off a contentious presidential election and now entering its second year of the pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 people in the country alone, moved up one spot in the rankings this year but just barely missed the top five. The Best Countries survey was conducted after the U.S. presidential election,” the survey found.

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