No, Democrats Did Not Steal a Wisconsin Senate Seat
Yes, a third-party Senate candidate who ran against incumbent Tammy Baldwin and Republican challenger Eric Hovde was a plant—but not an unwilling one.
ERIC HOVDE, THE MULTIMILLIONAIRE Republican who was narrowly defeated in Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate election on November 5 by soon-to-be-three-term Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin, lost no time pinpointing the proximate cause of his loss. It wasn’t that he was an out-of-touch extremist with a propensity for saying dumb things. It’s that the Democrats cheated.
“We’re watching the final precinct results come in,” Hovde told supporters early Wednesday morning as it looked like he would lose the race. “We’re certainly disappointed that the Democrats’ effort to siphon votes with a fraudulent candidate had a significant impact on the race, with those votes making up more than the entire margin of the race right now.”
The “fraudulent candidate” to which Hovde referred is Thomas Leager, who was recruited by donors and operatives associated with the Democratic party to run as a far-right conservative. (He appeared on Wisconsin ballots as the candidate of the “America First Party.”) With 99 percent of the votes counted, Leager ended up snaring 28,724 votes, or .8 percent of the total. Baldwin achieved a plurality with 1,672,418 votes, or 49.4 percent of the total, while Hovde earned 1,643,302 votes—48.5 percent. What Hovde said about the margin Wednesday morning is almost true: The difference between Baldwin and Hovde’s vote totals was 29,116.
If all of the people who picked Leager had instead voted for Hovde, he would still have lost, but by a mere 392 votes. (Leager actually came in fourth behind independent libertarian candidate Phil Anderson, who garnered 42,344 votes, or 1.3 percent. Anderson was allegedly elevated by people who wanted to take down Hovde, as well.)
On Wednesday, shortly after the race was called for Baldwin, the ever-combative Robin Vos, speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, told reporters at the state capitol that Baldwin’s win was essentially illegitimate:
The only reason that I think Eric Hovde lost was because the Democrats also recruited spoiler candidates to be able to run against him in the U.S. Senate. That’s the only reason that we had a single Democratic victory this year, and that was Tammy Baldwin finding a candidate to run as this America First person to be able to kind of deceive the voters.
The conservative news site Wisconsin Right Now also weighed in. “The Hovde loss is so infuriating,” it posted on social media. “The fake Dem plant Thomas Leager and the ‘fakriot’ push for Phil Anderson solely led to his loss. Moving forward, Republicans need to strategize better to stop this from happening, as the Dems will put these kinds of psyops into full gear for future elections.”
So there you have it. Trump won Wisconsin, with its ten Electoral College votes. Republicans retained their 6–2 domination of the state’s congressional seats and control of the state legislature. Despite Baldwin’s victory, the GOP took back the U.S. Senate, ensuring its ability to rubber-stamp Trump’s Supreme Court nominees as well as his cabinet picks, like possibly Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services. And still the Republicans are crying foul, as they now do reflexively.
There is, as it turns out, much to question about the actions that were taken to boost the candidacy of this fringe contender. It represents politics at a gutter level. But does it delegitimize the election or taint the candidate? That is worth exploring, since the claim is being made.
THOMAS LEAGER IS THE FORMER executive director of the locked-and-loaded advocacy group Wisconsin Gun Owners Inc. In 2020, he organized armed protests against government closures and mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s a known associate of some of the men who were charged in the 2020 plot to kidnap and perhaps kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
While Leager was never prosecuted in connection with that plot, he was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator by the Michigan attorney general’s office, along with more than a dozen others. Subpoenaed to testify at the 2022 trial for four of the defendants, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. A prosecutor in that proceeding said Leager was “under investigation for a similar plot involving a different” politician. He was also accused of having used his podcast to encourage violence against the FBI, which he denied.
“I was the Wisconsin target for the FBI in the Whitmer case,” Leager said in March on his podcast, which he streams on Rumble. “We just happened to slip through their nets.”
As described in an October 1 article by Ryan J. Foley and Brian Slodysko of the Associated Press, Leager was recruited to run by “Johnny Shearer” of the Patriots Run Project. Leager warned that his connection to the Whitmer case might make him a less-than-ideal candidate. But, Leager recalled, the Patriots Run Project was impressed that “I had not caved under pressure from the feds.”
Leager received $3,300 donations, the maximum allowable amount, from six donors. Leager’s financial backers included Joe Fox, a veteran consultant for Democratic campaigns, and David Steinglass, a retired private equity fund manager in Washington, D.C. (Leager himself chipped in $66.) Steinglass and his wife, Liz, who also gave money to other far-right candidates recruited by Patriot Run Project to run as independents in tight congressional races, declined opportunities to comment to the Associated Press reporters. David Steinglass is a self-described activist for transgender rights while Leager has called for banning gender-affirming treatments on minors.
The Patriots Run Project is not registered as a business, nonprofit group, or political committee. In an article published in September, Foley and Slodysko had tied the group loosely to Democratic consulting firms. “The only concrete identifying detail listed on the group’s website is a P.O. Box inside a UPS store in Washington, D.C.,” the reporters found. “Messages left at email addresses and phone numbers for the group’s operatives went unanswered.”
After the first AP article appeared, the outlet reported, “the group moved even further underground, disabling its account for X, formerly Twitter, and websites. More than 10 donors and consultants supporting its efforts haven’t returned messages.”
SUPPORTING A WEAK CANDIDATE you don’t want to win in the hope of hurting a strong candidate you don’t want to win is—let’s face it—dirty pool. But it does not follow that the result is corrupt.
First, a distinction can and should be drawn between actions initiated by a candidate and her party and those performed by others operating on their own accord. Representatives of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the House Majority PAC have denied having anything to do with the Patriots Run Project. Baldwin’s campaign also disclaims any role in Leager’s candidacy.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republicans including Speaker Vos engaged in their own calculated effort to sway the election: They placed on the November 5 ballot a referendum on a state constitutional amendment to make it illegal for noncitizens to vote, something that is already against the law and already not happening, except in extremely rare and isolated cases.
This unnecessary and xenophobic amendment was approved by 70 percent of the state’s voters, at least some of whom were likely drawn to the polls by its allure. The possibility that this helped Trump secure his win is no more speculative than that Leager’s presence on the ballot caused Hovde to lose.
It’s also hard to take Republican claims of malfeasance seriously when Republican operatives and networks did so much in 2024 to support third-party presidential candidates like Jill Stein and Cornel West in the hope that they would spoil races for Harris. Trump himself has supported Stein and West’s candidacies, and he has been open about why: “She takes 100 percent from [the Democrats]. He takes 100 percent.” Trump went so far as to describe Stein as one of his “favorite politicians.” She ended up playing a not-insignificant role in siphoning votes from Harris in Michigan.
And how unfair is it, really, that Leager was allowed to compete for votes? In Iowa, a candidate recruited by Patriot Run Project to run as an independent in a congressional race withdrew after realizing that he had been duped. The candidate, Joe Wiederien, had come to feel the effort to recruit him was “a dirty trick,” and he has called for an investigation.
But Leager appears to harbor no such grievances. While he was suspicious of the organization’s intent, they were not directly involved in his campaign, and ultimately, as he told a reporter, “I wanted to get in the game.” And here is what he tweeted on the morning after the election:
When you are principled, you always run the risk of being demonized as a scapegoat for those who put victory over principle. The @WisGOP backed the open borders, international globalist banker with a billion dollar budget. Next time they should back the America First candidate that has been fighting for this state for nigh on a decade. If they did, they’d be celebrating another Senate seat, rather than playing the blame game.
Later in the day, he followed that with this: “Hovde had every chance to win over my voters. Hovde handed the Senate seat to Baldwin.”
And while Hovde would have closed the gap a great deal if all of the people who voted for Leager had instead voted for him, there’s no reason to believe that they would have done so. As Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette University Law School poll, told Spectrum News: “I think the bottom line is, rarely do third party candidates really tip the balance, because their supporters would not go 100 percent for the losing candidate. They’re voting for a third party candidate precisely because they didn’t want to choose the Democrat or the Republican.”
As of this writing, Hovde has yet to concede the race or say whether he wants a recount. He is within the 1 percent margin that would permit this, but because the preliminary result puts the remaining gap between him and Baldwin at more than a quarter of a percent, Hovde’s campaign would have to foot the recount bill. In 2020, a pointless recount of the state’s two largest counties cost the Trump campaign $3 million.
The race between Hovde and Baldwin was the most expensive in Wisconsin history. According to Open Secrets, Baldwin raised and spent about $50 million, which was surpassed by some $60 million in outside spending on her behalf. Hovde also benefited from about $60 million in outside spending, to go along with between $25 million and $30 million that his campaign raised and spent, including $20 million of his own money he lent his campaign.
Both candidates had ample funds to deluge the airwaves with nonstop ads. Both had every opportunity to make their voices heard. Now it’s time for Eric Hovde and his GOP supporters to shut up.
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