re #110: “I think the rest of them are all either in liberal areas or skew pretty hard that direction despite their location.”
You may be correct, but in your shoes, (if you haven’t already), you might want to investigate further: Rice, Davidson, Wake Forest, St. Olaf, … (you mentioned Rhodes yourself). My kids didn’t apply to any of these schools, so I haven’t investigated them much myself, but in some cases the surrounding areas and/or other factors make them suspect on this score. To me. YMMV etc.
For example:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150226112946/https://oir.rice.edu/Historical_Facts/Students/Demographics__U_S_/
shows 60% of domestic students were from Texas (some sources say this is down to 50% now), by my count about 15% were from west coast or northeast.
For Wake Forest it was about 25%. Could perhaps be that the students attending are different from their surrounding environments, that does happen.