Karl Rove is throwing in the towel.
In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” the Republican strategist said that Donald Trump’s poll numbers are simply too dismal to end in victory on election night.
“I don’t see it happening,” Rove told Fox. “If he plays an inside straight, he could get it, but I doubt he’s going to be able to play it.”
Rove explained Trump’s electoral vote deficit, swing state by swing state. Mitt Romney only won 206 electoral votes in 2012, and according to Rove’s judgment, Trump can only feel comfortable about 168, with just over two weeks to go before the Nov. 8 election.
Trump, Rove said, is barely eking out a polling lead in Ohio and Iowa, which Obama won in 2012. But he is also behind in North Carolina and Arizona, states that Romney won. And his deficit in other electoral vote-rich states like Florida is so severe that he is unlikely to pull ahead.
“I doubt that in the just over two weeks we’ve got left, conducting the kind of campaign he’s conducting, that he’s going to be able to swing 1 out of every, you know, 10 voters, 1 out of every 12 voters, 1 out of every 15 voters and 1 out of every 6 voters in a state and convert them,” Rove said.
Rove is not a man who gives up easily. In 2012, he had an on-air meltdown over whether Romney had won or lost Ohio, insisting in vain that the Republican nominee still had a chance to win the election. Romney lost.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.