Poll: North Dakota Is Most Trusted State In America

North Dakota Democrats are throughly marginalized. They hold not a single statewide office, and they haven’t had a majority in either house in the state legislature in over 20 years.

As you might expect, they’d like to change that, but standing in their way is the fact that things are pretty good in North Dakota. Jobs are plentiful. Personal incomes are rising. Which is why Democrats spend so much time focusing on the negative.

They have to convince a state full of happy, contented people that they should be neither happy nor contented.

How are they doing? Not so good. Poll after poll shows North Dakotans to be pretty satisfied. The latest is this one from Gallup, which shows that North Dakotans have more trust in their state than the citizens of any other state in the nation.

Agree or disagree with the results, that’s pretty big for Republicans. Citizens who are happy with the status quo, who have trust in their government in these cynical times, are unlikely to vote for big changes.

Zooming out to the national level, consider this correlation between Republican states and greater level of trust in government:

Using Gallup’s 2013 data on state party affiliation, average trust in state government is 67% in solidly Republican or Republican-leaning states, 58% in competitive states, and 53% in solidly Democratic or Democratic-leaning states.

States that lean Republican get more trust than states that lean Democrat.

There could be a lot of explanations for that. Gallup suggests population is the issue. Republican states have less population than Democrat states, generally speaking, but I’m not sure I understand the leap from that to trust in the state government.

I suspect Tacitus may have a better explanation: “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.”