The pathway for an election victory for President Donald Trump will have to include the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, assuming he wins in battleground states he took in 2016, according to GOP strategist Karl Rove, who Wednesday outlined three potential scenarios involving each of the battleground states.
"If he wins Pennsylvania and loses Wisconsin and Michigan, he has 280 Electoral College votes," Rove told Fox News' Sandra Smith on "America's Newsroom." "Let's assume he holds the same states he won last time around, [and] in the Great Lakes area he wins Michigan and loses Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, he is at 276."
And, said Rove, if Trump holds the states he won last time and wins Wisconsin but loses Pennsylvania and Michigan, he'll have the 270 votes he needs to win the Electoral College vote.
Meanwhile, it is a "huge priority" for Trump to win Maine and Nevada, said Rove.
"If he loses one of them, he is at 269," he told Smith. "That is a tie. If he loses both of them, he ain't president anymore. This is the best option he has got to go to victory."
He later in the interview, however, made a correction, saying that if Trump wins in Pennsylvania, he'll have 306 electoral votes, but if "he loses Pennsylvania, he is at 286, not 280."
Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by 44,000 votes, less than one half of 1%, he pointed out.
But if Trump doesn't win Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin, he has to win a combination of states that have 10 electoral votes, such as Nevada and New Hampshire, or win Minnesota and its 10 electoral votes.
"It is a very narrow path," said Rove. "The best way to get there is to get there by winning things that you won before."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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