"endangered"...hardly. That species thrives everywhere, here the variant is known to the internet as "Florida Man" but it's the same thing as you find in NY or parts of Canada etc. I'm heading up on vacation to MN this fall and I may encounter some. They seem to find plenty of redneck women to mate with and have them some young uns, often many of them.
As far as the main story goes, it's the same old thing with the GOP. They know very well that an educated public on the whole won't vote for them (read the voting stats, you can bet the educated GOP officials surely did....). Their biggest challenge is figuring out how to keep college-educated women from voting, or at least from becoming educated, because that's who is keeping the Democrats afloat. So you get laughable (as in silly, but still dangerous) attempts to paint education as "liberal brainwashing" or that the "UN globalists" were taking over school curriculums (that was big years ago) and so on. What they really hate is simply the education.