Check your history again, Stainless. The great plains states were voting Republican while y'all were drooling over Jimmy Carter. Your conservative credentials are recent by comparison.
Unfortunately those states have all of about a dozen electoral votes combined. Well, maybe a dozen plus a few more, but the fact is that the southern electoral votes are the key to a Republican in the whitehouse. Without them it is physically impossible to win and has been for about a decade at least. The south began splitting towards the GOP in the 1950's with Eisenhower, BTW. It has become progressively more republican ever since and has given a majority of its votes to the republican in every election since Reagan. Yankeeland, by contrast, voted in near unanimaty for Bill Clinton not once but twice.