The issue is that Texas just isn't as Republican anymore, and that California is far too Democratic. In 2004 when Bush won the popular vote, he won Texas by 20+ points and kept California by less than 10%. However now, California is D+30 and Texas is single digits for the Republican party it is hard to win the popular vote.
You can compensate for TX being less Republican but only by so much. You run out of states and math to make it happen, unless you get back to the mid 40s in ILL, NY and/or CA.
There are things you can do though with say a 8% - 12% TX win to win the PV, but those include being over 5% margin as well in PA/WI/MI, winning OH by more then 10%, winning Florida by 5%-6%, and getting over 60% in IN, MO, KS and NE.
Some of this math is already there.
Republicans supposed "disadvantage" in the popular vote is oversold. Any plausible Republican nominee *not named Donald Trump would have won the popular vote against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and said Republican would have probably been reelected (with a popular vote mandate) in 2020.
could be true.
nightmare scenario for dems is that their collapse in the rural areas is due to structural reasons (change in dem party platform, general issues, etc), while the gop collapse in suburbs is largely due to trump's conduct. Nightmare scenario for dems is a 2024 gop nominee maintaining trump margins in the rurals, while swinging burbs 5-10% gop.
I am thinking that Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, or Marco Rubio are the types of candidates who could do that in 2024, which would be terrible for the Democrats going forward. They are already locked out of the Senate until 2032, so this would be a worse case scenario for them.
Yes those three would be on the list of possibilities to pull that off. There are one or two others as well.
