If the 2016 presidential election is all about Donald Trump, the gubernatorial landscape remains, to a large degree, about a more commonplace issue: the economy.

For the first time since 2013, we've ranked the overall economic performance of the 50 states. The results show a connection between a state's economic performance and its governor's approval ratings.

To determine which states are doing well and which aren't, we looked at six variables from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis: the current state unemployment rate; the improvement in the state unemployment rate over the past year; the per capita state GDP in 2015; the percent change in real state GDP between 2014 and 2015; the percent change in state personal income per capita, from the third quarter of 2015 to the first quarter of 2016; and the percentage growth in year-to-date increases in jobs for 2016.

These variables were chosen to offer a mix of static and dynamic measures of the states' overall economic performance. (See details on our methodology at the end of the story.)

As in the 2013 rankings, we decided to focus on the top and bottom of the list because it's hard to say whether the states in the broad middle have relatively strong or weak economies.

Our results are notable for their degree of flux. Only two of the top 10 states in 2013 -- Oregon and Utah -- repeated on the list in 2016. And only three of the bottom 10 states in 2013 -- Connecticut, Mississippi and New Mexico -- remained in the bottom 10 in 2016.

Also of interest, a majority of the top 10 states are either blue or purple-to-blue on the presidential level, while most of the bottom 10 are red or purple-to-red states. States with favorable economic results the past eight years would presumably be more eager to support Clinton, whereas states with unfavorable economic results would be more hospitable to Trump.

The parties of the governors, meanwhile, don't line up quite as neatly. For instance, two of the presidential blue states in the top 10 have Republican governors -- Massachusetts' Charlie Baker and Maryland's Larry Hogan. The red states of Louisiana and Alaska, which are in the bottom five, respectively have a Democratic governor and an independent governor who ran on a ticket alongside a Democrat.

Here is the full list of states, ranked from strongest to weakest. Duplicate numbers indicate a tie.

1. Massachusetts

2. Oregon

3. Delaware

4. Colorado

5. California

6. Tennessee

7. New Hampshire

8. Utah

9. Virginia

10. Maryland

11. North Carolina

12. Hawaii

13. Florida

14. Idaho

15. Georgia

15. Minnesota

15. Nebraska

15. South Dakota

19. Arkansas

20. Wisconsin

21. Texas

22. Washington

23. Michigan

24. New Jersey

25. Vermont

26. South Carolina

27. Indiana

28. Maine

29. New York

30. Ohio

31. Montana

32. Missouri

33. Nevada

34. Illinois

35. Rhode Island

36. Iowa

37. Kentucky

38. Kansas

39. Pennsylvania

40. North Dakota

41. Arizona

42. Connecticut

43. Alabama

44. Oklahoma

45. Mississippi

46. Louisiana

47. New Mexico

48. Wyoming

49. Alaska

49. West Virginia

How the Rankings Coincide With Governors' Popularity

Once we compiled the state economic rankings, we cross-referenced them with gubernatorial approval ratings to see whether governors of strong economic states were being rewarded by the voters.

In general, they have been.

We used the results of a 50-state series of gubernatorial approval polls conducted by the online publication Morning Consult between January and May 2016. We also spot-checked other gubernatorial approval polls in the past eight months and found them to be generally similar to what Morning Consult found.

The approval ratings for governors of the top 10 states averaged 62.1 percent, while the gubernatorial approval ratings for those in the bottom 10 averaged 50.8 percent. No governor in the top 10 states had an approval rating lower than 54 percent, while six of the governors in the bottom 10 states had approval ratings below 50 percent and one -- Connecticut's Dannel Malloy, a Democrat -- had an approval rating as low as 29 percent.

Here's the list of governors, and their approval ratings, in the top 10 states:

1. Massachusetts Charlie Baker (R) 72 percent 2. Oregon Kate Brown (D) 54 percent 3. Delaware Jack Markell (D) 66 percent 4. Colorado John Hickenlooper (D) 60 percent 5. California Jerry Brown