We have seen a surge in population all over Montana in the last few years. Many factors play into this including outdoor recreation, scenery, cost of living, remote work opportunities, and just being an overall rad state. What if people were leaving their home state to move here because we are just nice?

New data gathered via internet-searched keywords from wordfinder shows that Montana is far and above any other state when it comes to politeness (via web searches anyway). They collected Google trends from across the U.S. in 2022.

Montana was, far and away, the politest state. More than 270,000 of their searches per 100,000 residents in the past year included polite terms, especially “please.” Meanwhile, the state scoring lowest for politeness was California.  -wordfinder.yourdictionairy.com

As it turns out California only had 10 (vs Montana's 270,000) searches for polite terms per 100,000 residents.

Now, of course, California has way more residents than us. For now anyway. Now, since the data collected was throughout the 2022 year, and lots and lots of Californians have been moving here the past few years, is there a chance maybe we just got all of their super "internet polite" transplants?

Personally, I have a hard time buying that. It's not uncommon to see news stories where California transplants disregard local wildlife laws like the couple that landed a helicopter in the Bob Marshall, or recently the couple in Glacier Park that decided to dig up a stream bed to build a house without correct permits. And don't even get me started on how some California transplants carry themselves at our local watering holes. 

Now, remember there are plenty of polite and mean people in every state. That's obvious. Maybe it's that things move a bit slower here, and most of us longtime Montana residents learned to use good manners and be polite with the fear of a belt if we didn't. And maybe this is just a poll that shows Montanans are overly polite on the internet and it's more for fun than cold hard facts.

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