It's a truly wild fact that 2020 was the first election in decades that the biggest R net vote total state wasn't Texas. It was Tennessee. Trump won TN by 708k votes and TX by 631k votes. You have to go quite a ways back before 2020 to find a race where TX wasn't this for the Republicans.
TN is an excellent fit for the Trump era GOP, as is the rest of the Upper South, which generally seems to be the Trumpiest region of America in terms of Trump having an edge over average garden variety Rs.
Tennessee is also notable in that it's an upper South state with sunbelt growth patterns -- which means you get the hegemonic national Republican dominance of a Kentucky without the residual blue dog support base to put Democrats in the mix in state elections.
