Calling Texas a battleground is like calling Colorado a battleground.
It swung 1 point this year more to the Democrats relative to the NPV, and Trump is doing abysmally bad among suburban educated whites. It actually swung more Republican as recently as 2008-2012.
I wouldn’t say it’s solidly Republican anymore like it was staring in the 90’s, but it’s not a toss-up, either.
Colorado seems to have spiraled out of contention in Presidential politics. OK, maybe Trump is a freakishly-bad match for the state, but still... it is a bad match for the Republican Party. Based on 2020 it is about 10% more D than the US as a whole, and it last went for a Republican nominee for President sixteen years ago. I have an early handicap of the 2024 Presidential election, and all that keeps me from assessing Colorado as being as out of reach of the Republican Party as... let us say New Jersey... is that it did go R in 1996, 2000, and 2004.
Trump may be a bad match for offending the sensibilities of well-educated people. This said, if as a pol I must choose between having well-educated people and ignoramuses as my supporters I would prefer the well-educated because the latter are less likely to change their beliefs on some specious argument. Events and objective reality will change their minds just as, one hope, they would change mine. Note well that the Republican Party has increasingly sought the sort of people that Hillary Clinton arrogantly called a "basket of deplorables". She may have been arrogant, but she is right about them.
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