On Fox News Sunday this morning, Karl Rove threw cold water on the murmurings by unnamed “top Republicans” that a new candidate could emerge should Romney lose Michigan.
Host Chris Wallace outlined a scenario in which a new candidate could still get on the ballots of California, New Jersy, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and possibly Texas, and win enough delegates to contest the convention.
But Rove was skeptical, to say the least.
“This proves mental illness is transmittable by contact, personal contact. You’ve been talking to all these people and — look, let’s go. . . . Let’s take that list that you just threw up, and let’s add in one more big state just for the heck of it, Texas. . . . There are 554 delegates up in those states that you talked about, plus Texas; 222 of them awarded, winner take all; 332 of them awarded proportionately.
“So in other words, even if the candidate gets in and wins the big states with winner take all, and wins half of the states with proportional, wins half of those delegates, we’re talking about 350 out of over 2,000 delegates. And that may be enough to toss it into a convention that gets — that gets decided at the convention, but that is different than . . . brokering a convention.
Rove added, for good measure, that the thought the possibility of the last scenario — a new candidate with enough delegates to see the nomination decided at the convention itself — was as “remote as life on Pluto.”
“We have got a nationwide, at least in the punditry class, a call of premature electionitis,” said Rove. “We have got 54 contest in this thing. And we concluded five of them.”
The full transcript of the exchange is here.