Eric Hovde speaks in a video posted on X Tuesday, Nov. 12, in which he questions how ballots were counted in his election loss to Sen. Tammy Baldwin that was called early Nov. 6. Hovde did not concede then, only doing so on Monday, Nov. 18.. (Screenshot | Hovde campaign on X)

Poor Eric Hovde. His protestations that the election was rigged against him have fallen on deaf ears. Hovde’s grudging concession to Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who beat him by 29,000 votes to hang onto her seat in the U.S. Senate, came as Republicans across the country rejoiced at winning control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Like his Tom Selleck mustache, Hovde’s election denial is way out of style. 

Hovde’s baseless accusations during his very tardy concession speech about the questionable “legitimacy” of “absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m.” is so 2020. This year, Trump won all the swing states and, unlike last time, when he lost to Joe Biden, allegations of illegal voting, fraud, recounts, court challenges and death threats aimed at election officials have disappeared like morning dew in the Southern California sun.

Hovde heads home to Laguna Beach, California, a lonely, sore loser instead of storming the U.S. Capitol as a champion for MAGA grievance with his Trump-supporting friends. 

“I entered the race for the U.S. Senate because I love our country and I’m deeply concerned about its direction,” Hovde declared in his concession speech Monday. By then, the country’s direction had taken a sharp right turn. 

The top concerns that Hovde, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, said motivated him to run — government spending, border security and international relations — are now firmly in MAGA hands. 

“Lastly, as I’ve repeatedly expressed, I’m very worried about the political divisions and rhetoric that are tearing our country apart,” Hovde declared.

This last worry led him, Hovde said, to run a campaign that “focused on issues instead of personal attacks.” He followed this assertion by besmirching the integrity of Wisconsin election officials, denouncing his opponent as a liar and blaming Democrats for underhandedly stealing the election from him by allowing third-party candidates to run and by spreading rumors that he’s a California bank owner (a verifiable fact). For good measure, he added, “Equally concerning is the large segments of the press that don’t care to fact-check these lies and even helped propagate misinformation to help their preferred candidate.”

Anyone who watched the debate between Hovde and Baldwin might be surprised to hear Hovde congratulate himself for running a high-minded campaign rooted in the “values of integrity and morality.”

“The one thing you’ve perfected in Washington is your ability to lie,” Hovde sneered at Baldwin at the start of the debate. While Baldwin focused on her long record of detailed policy work, reaching across the aisle to pass bills that helped Wisconsinites, Hovde relied heavily on unsubstantiated accusations and repeatedly called out Baldwin’s girlfriend, a Wall Street investment adviser, demanding that she release financial information she is not required to disclose and unsubtly calling attention to the fact that Baldwin, an out lesbian, is in a same-sex relationship. 

This week, Baldwin is back in Washington doing what she does best — focusing on unsexy issues that matter to her constituents (see her Wednesday press release: “Baldwin Calls on USDA to Provide Emergency Aid for Gamebird Farmers Hit By Tornadoes”). Hovde, who admitted during the debate that he doesn’t know much about what’s in the Farm Bill and then griped afterward to rightwing talk radio host Vicky McKenna: “Like, I’m supposed to study [the bill] in depth?!” can’t imagine why Wisconsin chose Baldwin over him.

There was nothing nefarious about Baldwin’s win. She received a predictable boost from absentee voters in heavily Democratic Milwaukee, and as she has done in her previous statewide races, and she got a lot of votes in Republican-leaning areas of the state where she has spent a great deal of time listening to her constituents and championing their interests in bills that help Wisconsin agriculture and manufacturing. That’s the kind of work that made her the only Democrat to win the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.

Hovde distinguished himself, according to The New York Times, by becoming the first prominent Republican in the nation to suggest the election was rigged, parroting Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories. 

Fortunately, this year Hovde’s complaints are just one man’s sour grapes. But in his incivility, his poor grasp of policy, and, most of all, in refusing to concede for so long and, even when he did, questioning the integrity of the election, Hovde made a divisive political environment more toxic.

As Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local told Erik Gunn, “The rhetoric of questioning our democracy is more than just words. … It  contributes to chaos and confusion, which undermines public trust in our elections and the officials who administer them.” 

As Hovde himself might put it, the kind of campaign he ran is tearing our country apart. Fortunately for Wisconsin, in this case, it’s over. 

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Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, introduces Sen. Tammy Baldwin at her victory celebration Thursday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

In the midst of a barrage of absurd and appalling news pouring out of Washington, where President-elect Donald Trump keeps topping himself with new, unqualified cabinet appointments, Democrats are looking for hope in Wisconsin.

Two bright lights from our state made headlines after Nov. 5. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin bucked the red wave to win a third term, and Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler was reported by Politico to be in the running to lead the national party. Baldwin and Wikler share an approach to politics that could help guide Democrats out of the wilderness. 

After losing the White House and failing to capture control of either the U.S. Senate or the House (not to mention the likelihood of two new Trump appointments on the U.S. Supreme Court that could create an enduring far-right supermajority), Democrats would do well to look to Wisconsin for a new approach to politics.

In Wisconsin, Trump’s margin of victory — 0.9% of the vote — was the narrowest among the seven swing states he carried. Baldwin, as she has consistently done, made inroads in rural, Republican-voting counties. And Wikler deployed an approach to organizing across rural and urban areas of the state that took no vote for granted.

While extreme polarization and losing touch with working-class swing-state voters are widely counted as prime reasons Democrats lost the 2024 election, Baldwin and Wikler have a recipe for addressing those problems.

“It’s a state where showing up, being present in all different communities, rejecting the kind of false choices that cable pundits might like to inflict on a state like Wisconsin, and rolling up your sleeves can make the difference,” Wikler told me back in 2019, shortly after he moved back to Wisconsin to reenergize the state party. At that moment, Republicans had just lost complete control over all three branches of state government, with the election of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2018. Since then, Wikler has overseen a scrappy fight to claw back power in a state where Republicans, until recently, still dominated politics.

Wikler followed his own advice, opening new field offices across the state. He remained tenaciously upbeat as he steered his party through the rough waters of the pandemic and, in addition to helping elect President Joe Biden and reelecting Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, helped shepherd in a new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court that ended the worst partisan gerrymander in the nation, which had protected a wildly disproportionate Republican legislative majority. 

I was impressed by Wikler’s optimism back in 2019, when the gerrymandered maps seemed insurmountable. 

He pointed to grassroots organizers all over Wisconsin who were building the case for fair maps, and “getting every elected group of human beings in the state to pass resolutions condemning gerrymandering.”

“All of that needs to clearly lead to electoral accountability for anyone who smashes the idea of representative democracy in the state,” Wikler said at the time. It sounded wildly optimistic. Yet here we are.

Commenting on the eternal debate about whether Democrats need to drive their base to turn out or persuade disaffected centrist Republicans and independents to vote for Democrats, Wikler told me, “in Wisconsin we have to do both.”

“The thing I’m frustrated by every day is the idea that you can’t fight for both white working class voters and voters of color,” he added. “Guess what? There are people of all races in the working class. And all of them want schools and jobs and safe communities and air they can breathe. And none of them like the effects of Trump’s actual policies—even if some of them think they might like Trump as a guy.”

That philosophy is very similar to the politics practiced by Tammy Baldwin, who consistently amazes pundits by winning rural and working class voters even though she is an out lesbian with a strongly progressive voting record. Listening carefully to her constituents and delivering for them, whether through the provision she wrote into the Affordable Care Act that lets children stay on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26, or federal investments in Wisconsin farming and manufacturing, or “Buy America” rules, Baldwin connects with her constituents across the ideological divide. 

As Baldwin puts it, “People across Wisconsin want solutions to their challenges and are not all that interested in Republican versus Democrat—they’re interested in who you’ll stand up to, and who you’ll stand up for.”

Wikler agrees: “The key thing to understand is that Wisconsin voters are less centrist than they are conflicted. There’s a populist streak that has both left-wing and right-wing flavors that runs through the state. And the fundamental question that voters are asking is: ‘Is this person on my side?’”

That’s a clarifying vision that could lead Democratic politicians and voters toward a brighter day. 

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Photo by Greg Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner

Wisconsin’s sizable rural electorate played a decisive role in flipping Wisconsin into the win column for Donald Trump this week.

Trump won Wisconsin’s rural vote by a margin of about 22.3 percentage points, a 2.4 point improvement over his 2020 performance.

That amounted to a gain of about 29,000 net votes for Trump, compared to 2020. That accounts for nearly all of Trump’s statewide victory of 30,000 votes.

Trump also improved on his 2020 turnout across the state in all of the Daily Yonder county categories, from major metropolitan areas to small metro areas. But his largest turnout gain was in rural counties. In Wisconsin, where rural voters make up 26% of the electorate, compared to about 15% nationally, the rural gains were decisive.

(This article uses the Office of Management and Budget 2013 Metropolitan Statistical Areas to define rural. Counties that are not in a 2013 metro area are considered rural.)

Unlike in Pennsylvania, where Trump won because Harris hemorrhaged votes in urban areas compared to Joe Biden’s performance in 2020, in Wisconsin Trump won the state in a battle of turnout.

Both candidates got more votes in 2024 than presidential candidates in 2020 in Wisconsin. But Trump attracted more of that increased turnout to his camp, improving his percentage of the two-party vote in all but four counties.

Three of the counties where Trump did not improve his margins were in the Milwaukee metro area, but one was rural. Door County, which flipped from Trump to Biden in 2020, remained in the Democratic column this year, with a slight increase for Harris over Biden’s performance.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Wisconsin State Flag | Getty Images

Look on the bright side — all the talk about a stolen election, massive voter fraud, rigged voting machines and threats against local election workers disappeared overnight. Instead of planning an insurrection, MAGA Republicans have pivoted to picking out their outfits for president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration parties. 

The minute it became clear that Trump won, Republican fulminating about “massive cheating” blew over. Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe declared the election in Wisconsin a “great success.” Bipartisan poll watchers agreed: the whole thing went off  practically without a hitch. Never mind the WisGOP warnings all day on social media about (nonexistent) illegal voting by noncitizens. Never mind the grandstanding at Central Count in Milwaukee by fake elector scheme co-conspirators Sen. Ron Johnson, elections commissioner Bob Spindell and WisGOP chair Brian Schimming. All is forgiven, because Trump won Wisconsin.

The mechanics of voting are not under attack. Instead, a majority of American voters, including a majority of Wisconsinites, chose to elect a right-wing authoritarian leader and to give his party control of the federal government, apparently because they believe Trump will repeal pandemic-fueled inflation (which is already way down in the U.S.).

As my friend Hugh Jackson, editor of our sister outlet the Nevada Current wrote on Wednesday morning:  “the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. judiciary generally, is now even more on track to become nothing more than a functionary outlet for a right-wing extremist and authoritarian executive branch hell-bent on dismantling and superseding the rule of law. Also, poor Gaza. Poor Ukraine (poor Europe). And for all that, and so much more, a box of Honey Nut Cheerios still isn’t going to fall back to 2019 prices.”

Stress-eating leftover Halloween candy while watching the triumph of MAGA well into the wee hours, I remembered I’d agreed to speak to a group of retirees the morning after the election. What was there to say? The election results are a gut punch. Here in Wisconsin we are at the center of it. “You know Wisconsin put Trump over the top,” a journalist in Washington, D.C., texted me, helpfully. 

Since I had to pull myself together and try to make sense of the results, I headed downtown and found myself in a room full of friendly faces. There’s no sugar-coating things, I told them. The results are a shock. Especially for Wisconsin’s immigrant community, this is a frightening time and we need to do everything we can to support people and ease the fear and suffering of those who are the targets of terrifying threats.

There are a few bright spots in Wisconsin among Tuesday’s results. In addition to the hiatus on election denial, there are the results of state legislative races — the first to be run with Wisconsin’s new fair maps — which ended the gerrymandered GOP supermajority in the state Senate and yielded a more evenly divided state Assembly. 

The end of gerrymandering is the fruit of a long, difficult battle by citizens determined to get fair maps. It’s worth remembering that when all three branches of government in Wisconsin were controlled by a single party, that goal seemed far off. And a hard-fought win it was. We’ve come a long way. Don’t forget that progress is possible. It’s important to combat despair. 

There will be a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking of this election. I’ve written about how I believe the Democrats lost touch with their working class base, and how Trump took the opportunity to move into that space with his right-wing populist message.

But the fact is Harris was a powerful candidate who picked up the torch from Biden when he fell apart, painfully, publicly and irretrievably. 

There are those who say our country is too sexist or too racist for a woman of color to be elected president. Another white guy would have been better, they suggest. Without a doubt, misogyny and racism were big features of the 2024 campaign. But you don’t beat that backlash by surrendering to it. And we must beat it back. That takes a lot of resilience. Harris took us another step forward in making Americans believe they could elect a female president. It will take more than one or two tries to bring that about.

For now, perhaps the most important thing for all of us who are hurting after this election is to prioritize real, human contact. Remember that you are still surrounded by friends, neighbors and loved ones. We need to connect with each other and stay in touch. As simple and maybe even simplistic as it sounds, we need each other’s company to help get us through this difficult time. We need to see other people in person and we need to take a break from scrolling online.

Being with other people, strengthening our bonds of affection and solidarity, is the foundation of democracy. That’s where we need to start. 

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Marquette University Law School Poll logo

The latest Marquette Law School poll released Wednesday found that the race between Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump remains extremely close in Wisconsin. 

Harris received 50% of support among likely voters, while Trump received 49%. The previous Marquette poll, conducted in late September, found that Harris received 52% of support and Trump received 48% among likely voters.

The poll, which was conducted between Oct. 16 and 24, surveyed 834 Wisconsin registered voters of whom 753 are considered likely to vote based on 2016 voting records.

“The race has tightened a little bit,” Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll, said in a public forum where he presented the poll results Wednesday. 

When third party candidates including Robert F. Kennedy and Jill Stein were included in the poll, Harris received 46% of support while Trump received 44% of support. Franklin said voters who are undecided and leaning toward voting for a third-party contribute to the uncertainty in this election. 

“They could so easily tip the scales one way or the other,” Franklin said. “If I haven’t made it clear by now, it should not surprise anyone if Donald Trump wins, and it should not surprise anyone if Kamala Harris wins. The polling averages for the state… are just so close that polling is not going to help us at all to have confidence in who is the likely winner.” 

The poll also found a large gender gap among voters with men favoring Trump 56% to 44% and women favoring Harris 57% to 43%.

Enthusiasm is also high with 66% of those polled saying they are very enthusiastic. Democrats had a slight enthusiasm advantage with 75% of Democrats saying they are “very enthusiastic” to vote compared with 66% of Republicans.

In the Wisconsin U.S. Senate race, Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who is running for her third term in office, polls slightly ahead of Republican Eric Hovde, a banker from California.

Among likely voters Baldwin received 51% of support while Hovde received 49%. The results are a big change from the last poll in September, which found that Baldwin had a lead of 7 percentage points over Hovde.

Baldwin was seen favorably by 45% of poll respondents, while her unfavorable rating was 50%; 5% said they haven’t heard enough to form an opinion. Hovde was seen as favorable by 36% and unfavorable by 48% of those polled, with 15% saying they haven’t heard enough.

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Bucky Badger | Photo by James Gould

With early voting underway and only six days until Election Day, on the streets around the State Capitol and on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, we asked people who they want to become the next president of the United States and what are the issues that matter to them.

Wisconsin is one of the key swing states that could determine whether former President Donald Trump returns to the White House or Kamala Harris makes history to become the first woman to hold that office.

 At one end of the iconic State Street is the Capitol and at the other lies the UW-Madison campus, home to nearly 50,000 students.

On your way down State Street, you can see shop windows with posters of Kamala Harris while around the Capitol on Monday a “Japan supports Trump” demonstration carried Trump flags.

At the Farmers Market on Saturday there were campaign tables set up with leaflets and flags. The election is hard to escape.

In a series of vox populi interviews, voters who gave only their first names spoke with reporter James Gould.

Jim, a middle-aged man who stopped to talk, said he was voting for “Trump, definitely.”

Asked why, he said former President Donald Trump “has proven he can do the job” and is “hands down” a more capable candidate than Kamala Harris.

The main issues in this election for Jim are the “economy and immigration.”

UW student  Zoe said her top concerns as she casts her vote will be “abortion rights, women’s rights and housing.”

She said women anywhere in the United States should have the “ability to get our help.”

Zoe said it is “truly difficult” for anyone in the “middle class to get affordable housing and live comfortably,” adding that Madison “has recently got so expensive.”

With all that in mind, she is voting for Kamala Harris.

Backing up that claim about the rising cost of living was another UW student, Austin. He added that anyone “working in the middle-class” is having a really hard time. Austin said he believes that “Kamala Harris has a plan to fix it” and doesn’t think Donald Trump has.

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Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Eric Hovde in the 2024 Senate campaign debate | Screenshot via Youtube

Eric Hovde doesn’t know much about the Farm Bill, he told the moderators of his debate with Sen. Tammy Baldwin, whom Hovde is running to replace. Investigative reporter Dan Bice called it “the worst moment” of the only debate between Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate candidates. Baldwin immediately cut an ad highlighting Hovde’s profession of ignorance.

Hovde says he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “Like, I’m supposed to study [the bill] in depth?” he griped to rightwing talk radio host Vicky McKenna. McKenna was sympathetic. “Every debate is rigged against Republicans,” she said. Anyway, the Farm Bill, McKenna and Hovde agreed, is just a big boondoggle. “It’s a bill about food stamps,” McKenna said contemptuously. 

“It’s all for big corporations, food stamps, everything else,” Hovde added vaguely. “And by the way, Sen. Baldwin, I bet, wouldn’t know one-tenth of what’s in the bill.”

In fact, Baldwin wrote a number of provisions of the Senate’s Farm Bill framework, including dairy business innovation grants, protections for farmers who face a sudden drop in milk prices or increase in the cost of feed, mental health supports for agricultural communities, a federal program to track foreign investment in U.S. farmland, upgrades for rural drinking water infrastructure and funding for rural hospitals, child care and economic development.

In the debate, she said she was disappointed by the delay in passing a new Farm Bill. (Congress takes up a new Farm Bill every five years. Because the House and Senate failed to agree on the 2023 bill, the 2018 bill has been extended.) But deep cuts to federal food assistance in the House version are unacceptable, she added. 

This is the sort of nerdy policy discussion that made Baldwin the first Democrat to receive the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation in 20 years. But it doesn’t make for sexy talking points in the campaign

Hovde, as Erik Gunn reports, is running a campaign fashioned in the image of former President Donald Trump, who gave Hovde his “complete and total endorsement”

His focus is on how “the American Dream is slipping away” and the country is in “decline” because of President Joe Biden’s “disastrous” stewardship of the economy and “the worst border crisis in our nation’s history.”

Unlike Baldwin, with her detailed policy proposals and long list of legislative accomplishments, Hovde is mostly running on a throw-the-bums-out mood of disaffection which appeals to Trump voters.

A lot of those voters are in rural parts of the state, where, as Hovde observed during the debate, you can see huge Trump and Hovde signs waving over farm fields along the highway

But those same areas have produced surprising margins for Baldwin, as split-ticket voters have repeatedly supported her, even as they cast their ballots for Republican presidential candidates. That’s because she regularly shows up to listen to them and gets deeply in the weeds on rural issues.

This year, like the presidential election in battleground Wisconsin, the Senate race is a tossup. No one knows how voters will weigh wonky policy proposals against outrage and showmanship. 

Nowhere is the disconnect between concrete policies and the politics of the current election more glaring than on the issue of immigration. Trump’s promised “mass deportation” would be a death blow to Wisconsin dairy farmers, removing 70% of the dairy industry’s labor force who are immigrants, mostly with no legal work authorization because Congress has not extended agricultural visas to year-round farm workers — including the people who milk the cows on Wisconsin dairies.

Baldwin has discussed that issue in public forums on the Farm Bill. But like other Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris in her campaign for president, she is not pushing back that hard against the Republican “border crisis” message. In the debate she focused on the importance of stopping fentanyl from crossing the border, not the degree to which Wisconsin farmers depend on undocumented immigrant labor. 

From a campaign perspective, Democrats have apparently decided that defending the immigrants who prop up so much of the U.S. economy is a losing strategy. As with the broader issue of the economy, including low unemployment, surging job growth and a dramatic recovery from the pandemic thanks in large part to the Biden administration’s aggressive investments (which, among other feats, cut child poverty in half while the nation experienced COVID lockdowns), Democrats are not swimming against the tide. They know people feel that prices are high and things aren’t going their way, and they don’t want to sound callous or out of tune by saying the economy is actually in good shape.

It’s up to voters to make up their own minds. As the Republicans say, are you better off than you were four years ago? Another question we’ll all have to answer: Do you think government policies like the Farm Bill can make things better or are you ready to throw a rock at the system and see what happens? The answer to that question will determine which radically different path we take in the future.

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