Karl Rove: Numbers Don't Point to Obama Third-Term Victory

President Barack Obama might believe he could have won a third term in office, but political analyst Karl Rove said Tuesday the numbers just would not have been there.

"We don't know whether or not his assertion is accurate or not," Rove told Fox News' "America's Newsroom," where the former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush remains as a correspondent. "First of all, he can't run again. He is limited to two terms. But there [are] interesting numbers in the exit polls."

In those polls, Rove pointed out on his trademark white, dry-erase boards, the numbers radically changed from 2012 to 2016, and could have pointed at an Obama loss for a third term.

"In 2012, 47 percent of the voters said the country was going in the right direction, voted for Obama, 93-7 over Mitt Romney," Rove saud. "Fifty-two percent said the country was going in the wrong direction and voted 13 percent for President Obama and 89 percent for Mitt Romney."

And when you fast forward to 2016, Rove said, "the percentage of the people saying we're in the right direction was down to 33 percent in the right direction. They voted for Hillary Clinton, those that said it was going in the right direction by 89-7 over [President-elect Donald Trump."

But nearly two-thirds of those questioned said they believed the country was going in the wrong direction in the 2016 exit polls, and of those, seven of every 10 voted for Trump.

"I'm not certain if I were President Obama I would be glibly saying 'I would have won,' particularly when you read the rest of the interview," Rove said. "He says, 'Oh, we were doing great things for rural America and they benefited from the Affordable Care Act, and we really, you know we really did a lot of things for working-class white voters. The economy was getting so much better.'

"This is not how people perceived the Affordable Care Act, or the Obama economy, or really even the impact of all of his policies."

Obama also did not seem to think rural America was worried about more than the newest farm bill, Rove said, and "not how safe the world was, how deficits were growing, and how the country seemed to be going in the wrong direction, and we're having economic recovery where people not seeing their paychecks grow."

Obama, during his interview with David Axelrod, said he is concerned the United States is moving into an era where it is looking for simple solutions, and Rove said he found that ironic.

"President Obama is revisionist, a very quick revisionist," Rove said. "Oh, 'I am the victim of people not understanding that I had complex solutions. They wanted simple ones. They opposed me right from the beginning. They didn't listen to me,' but the opposite is true.

"President Obama right from the beginning, his problem was he had too many Democrats in the Senate, too many Democrats in the House," Rove said. "He didn't feel he needed to rely upon Republican votes, and as a result rammed through legislation on a straight party-line vote. He paid no attention whatsoever to the ideas or interests of the minority."

Meanwhile, Bush came into office in a far more contentious election, but still passed his tax cuts in June of 2001 with a quarter of Senate Democrats voting for it, Rove pointed out.

"President Obama governed in a highly partisan, negative fashion and now is trying to look back and say, well 'I was the guy who was trying to get it done in a bipartisan way.'"

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