Will Wisconsin Voters Elect a Jerk for U.S. Senate?

Trump-backed Eric Hovde is keeping his hopes high and his scruples low in his bid to unseat Tammy Baldwin.

Wisconsin U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, left, addresses the audience at a campaign rally on August 20, 2024 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Vance is campaigning in several battleground states as part of his campaign efforts. (Photo by Andy Manis/Getty Images)

ERIC HOVDE’S CAMPAIGN IS “running out of money.” He told me so the other day. He’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But apparently he can’t afford to keep up with the cost of his own attack ads.

“Fellow Conservative,” began his recent email, addressed to me. “I need your immediate help to keep this ad running 24/7 online in Wisconsin through Election Day!” He said it was very important that this particular ad continue to run, as it represents “our best opportunity to expose undecided Wisconsin voters who will decide this TOSS-UP election to Tammy Baldwin’s willingness to line her own pockets at the expense of Wisconsin voters.” 

I don’t know if Hovde’s campaign scared up the $50,000 that he said was needed within 48 hours in order for the ad to keep running, but the ad was definitely not pulled. You can watch it here. It pictures Baldwin, the first openly lesbian (or gay) senator in U.S. history, alongside her partner, Maria Brisbane, who is described in a voiceover as “a Wall Street exec who makes millions advising the super-rich how to make money off of industries Tammy regulates.” 

A still from Hovde’s ad.

The ad, part of a tsunami of political spending on the race that has been going on for months, says Baldwin often doesn’t make it home to Wisconsin on weekends because “she’d rather be in New York at Maria’s $7 million condo.” For this reason, the narrator intones, “New Yorkers have given Tammy more than $1.3 million. Tammy Baldwin is not Wisconsin’s senator anymore, she’s the third senator from New York.”

As he 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. He insists this is a false impression. 

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. In February, he even jumped into the icy waters of Lake Mendota in Madison to prove it.

Hovde in a still from his video from Lake Mendota.

“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. Hovde, in contrast, has potential conflicts that are genuinely concerning, including his bank’s decision to accept money from a Mexican bank that has been tied to drug traffickers. 

More on this later.

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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. 

Hovde sent me another email linking to this article and asking me to give him money. “Donate now and help our campaign keep our foot on the gas in the final weeks of this race,” he pleaded. It’s hard to imagine his foot being anywhere else. 

The advantage in the race clearly remains with Baldwin, who has won two prior Senate elections, including one against popular former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson in 2012. (Hovde was an also-ran in the GOP primary for that election.) In 2018, she sailed past a longtime Republican state legislator named Leah Vukmir with 55 percent of the vote—a landslide in purple Wisconsin.

And Baldwin leads the current race in cash. The latest reporting, through July 24, shows she had raised almost $36 million to $16.8 million raised by Hovde, whose war chest contains $13 million in personal loans he made to his own campaign. The two campaigns together had by this time burned through more than $43 million. Many millions more are being pumped into the race by outside groups.

But 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. (It’s unclear how she was able to do this while spending as much time as possible hanging out in a pricey New York condo, all the while regulating entire industries.)

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. Hovde now says he supports the right of a woman to have an abortion “early on in a pregnancy,” although he hasn’t specified the exact point at which he thinks the right should be taken away. 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.

A still from a DSCC attack ad.

Hovde, meanwhile, has tried to paint Baldwin as a dangerous radical. In a pair of similar ads that began airing last week, the ominous voiceover accuses Baldwin and Vice President Kamala Harris of being birds of a feather in, as one of these ads puts it, “allowing men to compete in girls’ sports, funding a clinic that offers transgender therapy to minors without parents’ consent, giving stimulus checks to illegals while Wisconsin families struggle.”

A still from one of Hovde’s attack ads.

But 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.

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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 has his own record to defend in this area. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice reported, his Sunwest bank last December accepted $26.2 million in cash brought into the country on four airline flights from Mexico’s Banco Azteca as part of a massive currency “repatriation,” wherein American dollars spent by tourists are sent home. Banco Azteca has been accused of having ties with a Mexican drug cartel, and in recent months has been caught up in an alleged bribery scheme involving U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Texas.

Some U.S. banks have stopped doing business with Banco Azteca due to “risk and compliance concerns,” Bice wrote, but Hovde has had no problem. Hovde has defended the transactions, saying the money came solely from tourist activity and has been carefully audited, and he insisted that Sunwest “conducts extensive ongoing due diligence of its clients, and all underlying activities to prevent money laundering.”

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.

A still from Hovde’s “Tammy Baldwin is LYING” attack ad.

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.