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Karl Rove predicts that Mitt Romney will win at least 279 electoral college votes, and 51 percent of the popular vote to President Obama's 48 percent in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. But it's a very different prediction than the one Rove has been making on his own website. In his latest map, updated on Oct. 29 and seen at left, Rove gives Obama 221 electoral (from either solid or leaning states) and Romney has 206 electoral votes. So lets look at how Rove has to divide the remaining 111 tossup votes on his own map to get to a Romney victory of 279.
The top image is one possibility: Romney wins Ohio, Colorado, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Florida. "It comes down to numbers," Rove writes, before using a lot of words to argue why the numbers in the Ohio polls are wrong. Even after suggesting that Democrats registration and ground game advantages are overrated, Rove doesn't fully come out and say Romney will win Ohio. But he kind of has to. Romney has lead in only two of the last 20 polls in Ohio. Ohio doesn't register voters by party, but of the 1.3 million votes that have been cast, 30 percent were by people who voted in the Democratic primary, while 24 percent had voted in the Republican primary.