I would, and I have. Parts of New Jersey are pretty nice, parts of course are not. Vermont is fine. Washington and Oregon have some good wine country and mountains. I do agree the criteria appear to be, um, selected and weighted so as to produce that output.
Fortunately, this is another kind of ranking no one really pays any attention to. I use CNBC pretty often just to get stock quotes without logging on, I don't view them as particularly biased politically.