Voters may not turn out for Republican front-runner Donald Trump in November because the real-estate mogul is accustomed to addressing primary voters, not general election voters, warns Republican strategist Karl Rove.
In a commentary for
The Wall Street Journal, Rove offered some advice for Trump on bring the important swing voters into his camp for the general election, saying, "they are different from primary voters, and they aren't buying your act. Your negatives are sky-high with voters up for grabs this fall. Understand why they are concerned."
Rove also spoke on a panel at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Wednesday night, alongside David Plouffe, a political strategist who worked on President Obama's 2008 campaign.
Rove said Trump must "change his understanding" for the general election.
When discussing the potential Trump/Clinton matchup, Rove said, "We're going to have a much larger group of people . . . who look at both of these candidates and see two flawed people and say, 'I'm trying to decide between two not-great choices.'"
Plouffe said voter analytics and modeling are more important in the general election, and Trump has not addressed that importance.
During Obama's 2008 campaign, Plouffe said the campaign "modeled everybody in America. We made every decision based on those predictive models."
Trump is closing in on the Republican presidential nomination, with 673 delegates following Tuesday's primaries. It takes 1,237 to win the nomination.
Rove has been a frequent critic of Trump's campaign.
In another Wall Street Journal commentary, Rove said, "If Mr. Trump is its standard-bearer, the GOP will lose the White House and the Senate, and its majority in the House will fall dramatically."
For his part, Trump is no fan of Rove, calling him a "biased dope" in a tweet back in November.
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