I've lived in both WA and OR. I love the places and miss them sorely at times, but politically they suck. They are now run by progressives and the laws are slowly but surely tightening. I would avoid those states.
ID is a beautiful place and very conservative, so that might be a good choice. Never been to MT, so cannot really comment save to say the winters can be very rough. ND, IIRC, is a political shit hole. SD is far better, but again the winters are a bear. I love WY, so yeah... another good possibility.
All bias aside, I think WV would have been far and away the superior choice for the FSP. Most people here would be on board with the spirit of it. The country is gorgeous, it is not TOO far from civilization, low population of 1.8MM, low RE prices and taxes, except in a few places like Morgantown and Charleston, each dens of liberal iniquity.
We are on a modest 30 acres and pay about $300 in property tax. I can do anything I want on the land and nobody gives a shit. Cannot get away with this everywhere, but who wants to live in a place like Charleston? We were on 100 acres in Summers county and I could have lit a tactical nuke in the holler and nobody would have so much as noticed, much less cared.
Other reasons for WV: it is drug-ridden and has the highest per capita welfare recipiency in the nation, meaning it is ripe for improvement in those areas. Serious crime is very low here, such as murder and bank robbery, but petty crime is high. A neighbor got a flat on his trailer, parked it by Richadson's, drove just a couple miles home for a spare and when he got back, the trailer was gone.
It is arguably the most gun-friendly state in the nation with Constitutional Carry, no home-rule, castle- and stand-your-ground laws, and IIRC the highest proportion of Class III ownership in America.
Generally, the people here are friendly, very polite, mostly Christian but open minded and respectful of others' choices. They tend to be helpful. But there is also a lot of fat trash here. Nothing's quite perfect.
Huntington is a nice college town (Marshall U), as is Morgantown. Fairmont has entities like NASA and FBI operating there, so there are definitely upscale locales. Then there are town like Hinton, where we used to live, Logan, and Princeton, which are different worlds altogether.
A free state initiative in WV might work more readily than it has in NH as there are fewer entrenched progressive dumbasses to fight.
Just a thought.
