Worst U.S. state to live in

[RINO Tom]

This is always going to come down to personal preference ... if you're rich and find a charm in old school Southern culture, you likely wouldn't care or even notice that Mississippi or Alabama rank poorly in various metrics.  If you are into natural beauty and have a really nice cabin off by yourself where you live with your wife and you're both empty nesters, I doubt you really care how much of a joke West Virginia seems to be to the faceless internet posters of US Election Atlas.  So, for me, I will answer this strictly on personal preference:

Delaware

No city in Delaware interests me enough, it's far away from my family, the weather improvement (if there even is one) is way too marginal to sway things, there isn't really the cultural novelty that would come along with moving to some other states that have problems like the aforementioned Mississippi situation and I just have a strikingly lower interest in the state than most others.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a great state, it just would be my "worst state to live in."  It's an objectively better state in many ways than, say, Alabama, but I would rather be on the Gulf Shores than anywhere in Delaware.  The "statistically worst" state in the country is probably Mississippi or West Virginia, I would imagine.

[RINO Tom]

Honestly I'd say one of the West Coast states, they'd be the worst fit for me culturally out of US states and they're ridiculously expensive.

I can't remember your backstory (i.e., where you're originally from and live now), but I think people overrate how much you would have to pick where you live based on "cultural reasons."  Yeah, a flaming liberal wouldn't like it in rural Kansas, and a staunch right winger would not like it in downtown Burlington Vermont, but the vast majority of areas provide enough variation for you to feel more than comfortable.  Different things would definitely take priority (COL, niceness of the area, weather, etc.).

[RINO Tom]

The answer is objectively Alaska due to the miserable cold- unless you could afford to have it as only a summer home

Guaranteed lack of miserable heat, also nice landscape, and that Permanent Fund thanks to the oil.

Anchorage and the Panhandle aren't even that cold, either.

The average high in Anchorage in January is 22 degrees- no thank you!  I wouldn't want to live somewhere that regularly sees sub-40 high temperatures in the winter.  We get cold occasionally, but we usually can count on at least one 60-70 degree day a week, even in the middle of winter.  Winter gets depressing without that.

Then why single out Alaska if your threshold for dealing with weather is that low?

[RINO Tom]

Indiana

Pshhh.

Anyway, this got me thinking if there were any quantifiable ways to look at this ... it's pretty hard to pick one metric, and nearly all of them involve some type of subjectivity, but here is how USA Today ranked the bottom ten states in 2019:

50. Mississippi
49. West Virginia
48. Louisiana
47. Alabama
46. Kentucky
45. Arkansas
44. Oklahoma
43. New Mexico
42. Tennessee
41. South Carolina
40. Indiana

Some of these would be pretty damn skewed by certain areas, IMO ... for example, what does Alabama look like if you exclude the Black Belt?  Living in Nashville or the surrounding suburbs would be extremely different from Appalachian Tennessee, also.  Indiana continues to shock me that it ranks so low on lists like these, as it seems like a pretty nice state.  Also, for fun, here were the top ten:

10. Utah
9. Vermont
8. Maryland
7. Hawaii
6. New Jersey
5. Minnesota
4. Colorado
3. Connecticut
2. New Hampshire
1. Massachusetts

These seem about as equally debatable, IMO ... I'd wager a state like CT ranks highly because it had affluent and employable people moving there decades ago, and its forward trajectory and/or current state wouldn't really reflect it being the third best place to live.  Similarly, Maryland strikes me as a state whose potential problems will always be "covered up" on a list like this due to its proximity to DC.

[RINO Tom]

I don't think that states are a good measure of where to live because they are generally so diverse in terms of locales. Texas simultaneously has places like Austin and loving County. Illinois has Chicago in East Saint Louis + a bunch of near Appalachian downstate nowheresvilles. Even Utah has a huge difference between desert retirement homes Lake St George vs vibrant big cities like Salt Lake. Oregon sound awesome because of Portland and Eugene? Try living in some fading Timbertown near the Idaho border.

While there are a few states that border on being universally bad like Alabama and Mississippi, as long as I could live in some University neighborhoods of a big city or college town, that probably wouldn't be so bad. Idaho might be bad, but I hear increasingly good things about Boise.

If I didn't know any better, I would think you would actually prefer ... East St. Louis ... over the plethora of Downstate cities like Rockford, Peoria, Bloomington, Springfield, Champaign, etc.