"Affordability, anybody?

Mark Levin’s “Affordability, Anybody?” segment made a provocative claim: the states complaining most about the cost of living are often those run by Democrats, and indeed, many of the highest-cost states are governed by Democrats. In his video (see below) Mark highlighted a number of states and compared some components of the cost of living. I was curious to see whether his claim was true when examining all 50 states. 

Below is a 50-state cost-of-living bar chart (normalised so the lowest COLI state = 100). The chart is sorted with the lowest relative COLI at the top (Mississippi) and the highest at the bottom (Hawaii). The bars are colour-coded blue for Democrat-governor states and Red for Republican-governor states. 

Confirming Levin's claim, there are certainly more Red states at the top of the table and Blue states at the bottom. 

The bar chart was produced from the following table, that shows the states in Alphabetical Order. Notes are provided below to explain the source of the data.

Table of Relative Costs by State

Notes on the table:

• “Raw COLI” (Cost of Living Index) comes from WorldPopulationReview. (World Population Review)

• The “Relative Index” is calculated by taking each state's COLI, dividing by the lowest COLI state (Mississippi, COLI = 83.3) and multiplying by 100. That means Mississippi is set as 100, and every other state shows how much more expensive it is relative to Mississippi.

• The “Party” column uses the party of the current state governor (as of 2025) as a rough proxy for which party is “running” the state. (Wikipedia)

• Using the governor’s party is not a perfect measure of political control (doesn’t account for legislature or local regulation), but it’s a commonly used shorthand.

In conclusion 

No doubt, Democrats would be able to present some quite reasonable arguments against the simple conclusion that Blue states have a higher cost of living. But the evidence is certainly striking.

It is hard for Democrats to use the cost-of-living to beat up Republicans when it is predominantly their states that are suffering the most. It means that perhaps instead of complaining, they should look at what they could do to lower costs in their own states

Here is Mark Levin's video.