Could Raleigh actually be the top prospect for Amazon’s HQ2? One think tank says yes.

Raleigh is the No. 1 prospect for Amazon’s second North American headquarters, if you rank the finalists for HQ2 based on a recent index of best-performing cities in the United States.

Seattle-based Amazon pared a list of 238 candidates across the United States, Canada and Mexico, and announced the 20 metro areas that made the cut on Thursday – with Raleigh being one of them.

There will be innumerable rankings of the prospects, of course. The Milken Institute, a California think tank, came up with its version Friday by applying its list of the nation’s best-performing cities to the HQ2 finalists.

By that standard, Raleigh, which Milken named the No. 2 U.S. city for creating and keeping quality jobs, topped the institute’s assessment of the finalists, beating out such cities as Dallas, Nashville, Austin and Atlanta.

Since Milken’s index only included cities in the United States, Toronto was not evaluated. Toronto is the only remaining HQ2 candidate not in the U.S.

As much of a salute the forecast is, the image Milken Institute first used for the Oak City in naming it the second-best economy is actually a photo of the Durham skyline.

This story was originally published January 19, 2018 at 3:17 PM with the headline "Could Raleigh actually be the top prospect for Amazon’s HQ2? One think tank says yes.."