, Columnist
With an Economy Like New Jersey's, Why the Love for Christie?
Chris Christie's success is despite his economic record, not because of it, a Bloomberg economic index shows.
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New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's pugnacious personal style has won over the country's Republicans, not to mention unions and even some journalists, as he cruises to re-election this November. How well has he actually managed the state's economy?
Anyone can cherry-pick individual indicators to argue for or against Christie's record. So a better approach is to use a broad range of data, covering different aspects of the economy. Luckily, the crack economics team at Bloomberg News has created just such an index, called the Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States, or BEES, which tracks everything from employment to home prices to the stock performance of companies based in the state.