The Bulwark: ‘Will Wisconsin Voters Elect a Jerk for U.S. Senate?’
MADISON, Wis. — Today, Bill Lueders wrote about the litany of issues plaguing Eric Hovde’s campaign for Senate. Lueders pointed out Hovde’s track record of insulting Wisconsinites, lying to voters, and being an out-of-touch California bank owner who is unfit to be Wisconsin’s Senator.
Read more here:
The Bulwark: Will Wisconsin Voters Elect a Jerk for U.S. Senate?
By: Bill Lueders
As Eric Hovde heads into what is seen as one of the most competitive and potentially pivotal races for the U.S. Senate on the November 5 ballot, Hovde is doing his darnedest to shake off the image some people have of him as an elite outsider and somewhat of a jerk.
Just because he is a California banker with listed assets of between $195 million and $563 million, lives mostly in a $7 million oceanview mansion in Laguna Beach, was for three straight years named one of Orange County’s most influential people by a local business journal, and has frequently not even bothered to vote in Wisconsin elections, doesn’t mean Hovde is not intimately connected to the state’s working stiffs.
“So the Dems and Senator Baldwin keep saying I’m not from Wisconsin,” he says in the video while shirtless in the freezing lake. “Which is a complete joke. All right, Sen. Baldwin, why don’t you get out here in this frozen lake and let’s really see who’s from Wisconsin.” Like most sensible Wisconsinites, the senator stayed out of the frigid water.
Baldwin keeps most of her relatively meager assets, reportedly worth around $1.2 million, in a blind trust. Hovde has not committed to doing so, although he has vowed to “step out of any management role” at the Utah-based bank where he now serves as chairman of board. (The bank, ingeniously named Sunwest Bank, has branches in five states, not including Wisconsin, and some $3.4 billion in assets.)
And so even though his own financial conflicts are much greater and less well safeguarded, Hovde is going after Baldwin on this score, claiming she’s somehow helping the super-rich “make money off of industries Tammy regulates.” Hovde groused to the Wisconsin State Journal that Baldwin “doesn’t report what her partner is doing. If she was married, they’d have to report that, right? So she’s, again, trying to confuse people.”
But who is trying to confuse whom? Baldwin and Brisbane are not married, so under the law, neither has to report Brisbane’s assets.
THE WISCONSIN SENATE RACE IS one of several, also including Arizona, Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, that incumbent Democrats must win for the party to keep its slim majority. And while polls show that Baldwin continues to have a significant edge over Hovde, the challenger and his supporters insist the gap is narrowing.
“Vulnerable Sen. Tammy Baldwin loses ground to GOP candidate in Wisconsin, consecutive polls show,” declared a recent Fox News headline. The article noted that a Quinnipiac poll in May showed Hovde trailing Baldwin, 42 percent to 54, but a Quinnipiac poll released September 18 had him scoring 47 percent to Baldwin’s 51 percent. And an AARP survey of voters over fifty showed Hovde in the lead, 50 percent to 49 percent.
Baldwin’s greatest advantage is that she is well liked and respected in Wisconsin and known to be a hard worker. In 2023, her campaign tallied, she “attended or hosted nearly 150 community events and meetings with constituents” in 44 of the state’s 72 counties.
Hovde does have Trump’s endorsement, and yard signs touting his candidacy almost invariably appear alongside ones for Trump and Vance. Asked the litmus-test question of whether he would accept the results of the November 5 election, he said that he would, forgoing the boilerplate insurrection-friendly proviso about everything needing to be “honest.” But he also then compared Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 election result with Hillary Clinton’s complaint about Russia interference in the 2016 race, which led to exactly no assaults in the U.S. Capitol.
Perhaps Hovde’s greatest liability is his own past statements. In 2012, during his first run for Senate, he told the Wisconsin State Journal he was “totally opposed to abortion.” He also went on record that year saying Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Baldwin is airing a TV ad asserting that Hovde will, if elected, vote with other Republicans to impose a national abortion ban. (Hovde has denied this.) The ad features a Wisconsin woman who had to leave the state to get a medically necessary abortion. “What is wrong with these guys?” she asks.
Another Baldwin campaign ad recalls how Hovde said it’s “deplorable” that Americans are so politically uninformed, in part because “females . . . spend too much time focused on what’s going on in Hollywood.” (Men, for their part, are too caught up in sports, and “not just sports, it’s fantasy sports.”) What is wrong with this guy?” the ad asks.
On a Fox Radio program in April, Hovde shared his concerns about voting by old people in nursing homes, playing into a canard raised by the state’s election deniers. “Well, if you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months life expectancy,” he said. “Almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote.” Baldwin, in an appearance on MSNBC, unloaded. “Can you imagine saying this about your mother or your grandmother?” she asked. “Thousands of Wisconsinites live in nursing homes. Eric Hovde does not have a clue what he’s talking about.”
Hovde has also stated that the retirement age should be raised and Social Security benefits “absolutely” should be lowered. He’s said Obamacare should be repealed, and argued that overweight people should pay more for their health care. In response, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has launched ads pegging Hovde a “jerk.” The case could be made.
Perhaps the best example of how Hovde has embraced fantasy about his opponent is in his claims that Baldwin has “done nothing” to curb the deadly tide of fentanyl flowing across the U.S.-Mexico border.
SPEAKING WITH REPORTERS AFTER the state’s August 13 primary, Hovde insisted that Baldwin has done “absolutely nothing” to address the fentanyl crisis.
As the Wisconsin State Journal’s Mitchell Schmidt recently reported, Hovde’s statement overlooks a few things. Like, for instance, that Baldwin was a cosponsor of the FEND Off Fentanyl Act, a bipartisan federal bill to step up enforcement against opioid traffickers. Also, Baldwin voted twice for the bipartisan border security bill, which would have dramatically stepped up border security and enhanced law enforcement agencies’ ability to rebuff efforts to smuggle fentanyl into the country. That was the bill Trump ordered Republicans to reject, for purely political reasons.
And Baldwin, who was raised largely by her grandparents because of her mother’s struggles with addiction, in 2018 introduced the Restricting Entrance and Strengthening the Requirements on Import Controls for Trafficking (RESTRICT) bill, which would have given federal officials more tools to keep illegal drugs from entering the country. She also co-sponsored the Search Now, Inspect for Fentanyl (SNIFF) act, which would make it legal for U.S. postal workers to inspect the contents of packages they suspect of containing fentanyl or other drugs without obtaining a warrant.
As Columbo would say, just one more thing: Last year, Baldwin introduced the Safe Response Act, which would have extended funding for training for first responders on the use of overdose reversal drugs. None of these measures have yet passed, but Baldwin’s work in this area has drawn praise from law enforcement officers across the state.
Hovde’s campaign has hit back at his opponent with an ad titled “Tammy Baldwin is LYING” about her role in past efforts to curb fentanyl trafficking. The basis for this claim is a statement from Republican Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina, the chief sponsor of the FEND Off Fentanyl Act that Baldwin signed onto as a co-sponsor, that “I’ve never had a single conversation with Tammy about this bill.” Gasp. Shudder.
But Baldwin did back this bill, as well as others aimed at doing something about fentanyl; she emphatically has not done “absolutely nothing.” It takes a lot of chutzpah to deny actual reality, although Trump and his party have made it something of a signature move.
Eric Hovde is running a campaign of sound and fury, signifying nothing so much as his unfitness for the job he seeks.
###
