A ranking is only as trustworthy as the definitions buried inside it, and the Cato Institute’s “Freedom in the 50 States” project is refreshingly honest about what it is: a transparent, rules-based scorecard built on a libertarian definition of liberty, not a neutral referendum on good government. That honesty is precisely why its 2026 governor rankings reward careful reading rather than a glance at the headline grade.
Key Points
- Cato grades every governor on 97 policy variables across 10 categories, converting raw scores into a curved 0–10 freedom score and a letter grade.
- The methodology tries to isolate a governor’s personal contribution — bills signed, vetoes cast, proposals made — from the state’s inherited policy baseline.
- Montana’s Greg Gianforte took the top overall spot with a perfect 10 and an A in both economic and personal freedom categories.
- New York’s Kathy Hochul finished last; her office has publicly rejected Cato’s definition of freedom as tilted against worker and consumer protections.
- A score of 10 means “best among those measured,” not 100 percent compliance with Cato’s preferred policies — a distinction that matters more than the headline.
How the scorecard actually works
Cato’s index is not a vibe-based list compiled by pundits. It is built from 97 discrete policy variables, grouped into 10 categories spanning fiscal policy, housing, occupational licensing, technology and consumer regulation, education, speech, medicine, firearms, policing, and recreation. Each category generates a percentage score, which Cato converts to a 0-to-10 scale and then to a letter grade. Crucially, that scale is curved against the best and worst performers in the dataset — a governor who scores a 10 has out-performed every other governor measured, not achieved some objective ceiling of liberty. That distinction gets lost the moment a ranking becomes a press release.
The index also makes a methodological choice that deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets: every one of the 97 variables carries equal weight, and a restriction in one category can be mathematically offset by a gain in another. That is a defensible way to build a composite measure, but it is also a normative decision, not a discovered fact — nothing in nature says occupational licensing reform should count the same as a firearms statute. Researchers in the broader field of composite-indicator design have flagged this exact tension: there is no universally agreed method for weighting indicators, and equal weighting can quietly hand more influence to whichever dimension happens to be represented by more variables.
Separating the governor from the state
The more interesting design choice is how Cato tries to credit or blame a governor individually rather than simply handing them their state’s overall grade. The methodology gives governors extra credit for bills they personally signed that expanded freedom, and docks them for vetoes or proposals that would have reduced it relative to the status quo. It also distinguishes policy actually in force from policy struck down by courts — an overturned restriction generally doesn’t count against the state, though it can still count against the governor who proposed it in the first place. That is a genuinely careful attempt to solve a real accountability problem: governors rarely legislate alone, and academic research on gubernatorial accountability consistently finds that voters struggle to disentangle a governor’s personal influence from what the legislature, courts, or federal government actually did.
Even so, Cato’s own documentation concedes the limits of that effort. Governors often act “in cooperation with the legislature,” sometimes see their vetoes overridden, and inherit a baseline of restriction or permissiveness they did not create. The published methodology explains the rules but does not fully expose, for every one of the 50 governors, the line-by-line accounting of who gets credit when a law passes with mixed authorship. That is less a flaw unique to Cato than an inherent limitation of trying to score an institutional actor — the governor’s office — using tools designed to score a static set of state policies.
Where the 2026 rankings landed
The outputs are concrete enough to compare. Nine governors earned an A in the speech-and-association category alone, including Kim Reynolds, Bill Lee, Spencer Cox, Larry Rhoden, Gretchen Whitmer, Mike DeWine, Greg Gianforte, Tina Kotek, and Jeff Landry — a list that crosses party lines and undercuts any assumption that the index simply rewards Republican governors by default. At the top of the overall table, Montana’s Greg Gianforte posted a perfect 10 with an A in both the economic and personal freedom composites, and his office was quick to publicize the result. At the bottom, New York’s Kathy Hochul ranked last among all 50 governors.
Hochul’s office did not simply absorb that grade quietly, and its response is the one genuine point of disagreement worth weighing honestly. A spokesperson argued that “Cato’s idea of freedom means lower wages for hard working Americans, carrying guns without permits, AI chatbots running unchecked and social media giants gaining unfettered access to our kids,” adding that “if standing up for economic fairness and commonsense safety earns New York an F, that says more about the grader than the Governor”. The office separately pointed to New York’s wage protections, AI regulation, and child-safety rules on social media as values the index simply does not credit. That is not a factual rebuttal of Cato’s coding — it is a conceptual one, and it is worth taking seriously on its own terms.
Actually I’m not retarded. Well maybe. But according to the most widely cited index, Cato Institute’s Freedom in the 50 States, which ranks “how free a state is”; It scores states on 230+ policy variables covering fiscal policy (taxes/spending), regulatory policy, and personal…
— Nightcruzer🇺🇸🇩🇪🎚️⚔️🏋️ (@Nightcruzer1) October 21, 2026
The real disagreement is about what “freedom” means
This is where the index’s transparency becomes its greatest asset. Cato does not hide that it is measuring “the freedom of American adults to peacefully act in their own self-interest and dispose of their property as they see fit” — a specific, libertarian conception of liberty that treats deregulation, low taxation, and permissive gun and speech laws as freedom-enhancing almost by definition. Hochul’s office is making the opposite wager: that wage floors, product-safety rules, and guardrails on AI and social media are themselves a form of freedom — freedom from exploitation, fraud, and harm. Both positions are coherent. Neither is a neutral description of reality, and composite-indicator researchers studying government rankings generally have long warned that aggregation choices like these embed a worldview even when the arithmetic is scrupulously fair.
What this means for how you should read the ranking
None of this makes the Cato index untrustworthy — if anything, its willingness to publish its scoring rules, curve, and category breakdowns puts it ahead of most political “best states” lists that offer no methodology at all. The responsible way to use it is also the simplest: treat the overall letter grade as a relative snapshot within one specific definition of liberty, read the category breakdowns before accepting the headline, and recognize that a governor’s F on economic and personal freedom, by Cato’s lights, can coexist with real achievements the index was never designed to measure. The ranking tells you where a governor stands inside Cato’s framework. It does not, and does not claim to, settle the older argument over what freedom is for.
Sources:
redstate.com, cato.org, news.mt.gov, us.headtopics.com, usajournal.news