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Eric Hovde’s outsider bid to oust Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin
Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Eric Hovde in the 2024 Senate campaign debate | Screenshot via Youtube
This year’s race to represent Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate presents a stark contrast between incumbent U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and challenger Eric Hovde.
Baldwin, a two-term senator who previously served in Congress for more than a decade and in state and local office before that, faces Hovde, a banker whose only political experience was a failed Republican primary run for the same seat 12 years ago.
Baldwin points to the results of her lifelong work in politics — successful legislation addressing health care coverage, veterans, manufacturing and human rights, and also ambitious measures that have not passed yet.
Hovde is dismissive of Baldwin’s record and depicts his business background as an asset he can use in Washington to benefit Wisconsin. Combative during their only debate on Friday, Oct. 18, as well as in public interviews, he has taken a leaf from the playbook of former President Donald Trump, both in style and in the subject matter that he highlights.
Whether control of the Senate remains with the Democrats or shifts to the Republicans could turn on the outcome of the Wisconsin race, one of a handful getting close scrutiny in this election.
Negative campaigning has been commonplace for decades, but it’s especially prominent in the Baldwin-Hovde race.
“There’s a lot of mud being slung,” says Lilly Goren, political science professor at Carroll University in Waukesha. “It’s not as if we haven’t had mudslinging in Wisconsin politics before, but it feels like there’s a little bit more going on.”
Heavy attacks
From the moment Hovde entered the race, Democrats have pounced on the bank owner’s California connections, starting with his Orange County mansion and his high profile in the Southern California community, where a local publication named him among the county’s “most influential people.” In press releases, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has taken to calling him Eric Hovde (R-Laguna Beach).
Hovde defends himself as a Wisconsin native and still a legal resident who maintains his voting registration in Madison. At the debate he pulled out a utility bill to prove he has a local address.
Democrats have pushed for Hovde to declare that if elected he would remove himself from SunWest bank, which operates in California but moved its headquarters a few years ago to Utah. In September, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that Hovde said he would “step away” from the bank and was considering whether to put his assets in a blind trust if he goes to Washington.
Hovde, meanwhile, has pushed back with accusations that Baldwin’s partner, Maria Brisbane, an investment and wealth management adviser, puts the senator in a conflict of interest in connection with Baldwin’s Senate oversight roles.
The Senate’s ethics rules don’t address such a relationship, however. When Hovde raised the matter during the debate, Baldwin retorted that “Eric Hovde should stay out of my personal life, and I think I speak for most Wisconsin women that he should stay out of all of our personal lives.”
Reproductive rights
That response alluded to an issue that Baldwin has highlighted repeatedly: abortion and reproductive rights. During a rally with vote canvassers earlier in October, Baldwin recalled that Hovde “celebrated when the Dobbs decision came down” in June 2022 overturning the nationwide right to abortion enshrined in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision a half-century ago.
Referring to positions Hovde took in his 2012 GOP primary campaign, she added, “Previously he said he was 100% against abortion, and we have to take him at his word.”
Hovde has endorsed the Dobbs decision outcome for leaving the legality of abortion up to individual states. But he has also appeared to soften somewhat his earlier statements of opposition, saying several times, including in last week’s debate, that “women should have a right to decide early on in their pregnancy,” but not defining what period of time that would involve.
Under Roe, abortion could not be regulated by the state during the first trimester. Later in pregnancy, abortion restrictions were permitted.
During the debate, Hovde accused Baldwin of supporting abortion late in pregnancy, “where a baby can be born healthy and alive,” calling such abortions “unconscionable.” Baldwin quickly shot back, “Eric Hovde, that does not happen in America and it’s very clear that he has never read Roe v. Wade.”
Baldwin has authored legislation to codify the Roe decision. “I’m pushing to have that be the law of the land. Your rights and freedom should not depend on your ZIP code or the state in which you live,” she said.
Notwithstanding the wide range of other subjects that have surfaced in the race, Goren, the Carroll University professor, said in an interview that she’ll be watching how abortion and reproductive rights in the post-Dobbs era continue to play out at the ballot box.
“This is an issue area that both campaigns are focusing on in different ways,” she said. Wisconsin’s 1849 feticide ban — interpreted as an abortion ban for the first year and a half after Roe was rolled back until a Dane County circuit judge ruled that it did not apply to elective abortions — has given the topic new urgency for many women in the state.
Farm bill clash
When asked whether he would support passing the 2023 farm bill during the debate, Hovde answered, “Well, I’m not an expert on the farm bill because I’m not in the U.S. Senate at this point.” Then he launched into a call for farm bills “to get back to farmers” and to address the “regulations that Senator Baldwin and her allies continue to push on them.”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Dan Bice called Hovde’s answer “the worst moment” of the debate.
For Baldwin, it offered a target that allowed her to promote her recent endorsement by the Wisconsin Farm Bureau — the GOP-leaning group’s first endorsement of a Democrat in nearly two decades.
Wisconsin farmers have told her “they’re very eager to have Congress pass a new farm bill,” she said. The hold-up, she added, was that the Republican-controlled U.S. House has “basically eviscerated nutrition programs. Farmers support nutrition programs because it means purchasing their goods.”
Citing one of Hovde’s key talking points — calling for a cutback in federal spending to 2019 levels — she added that it would “cut the U.S. Department of Agriculture by 30% — that is not standing up for our farmers.”
Incumbent’s resume
Challengers typically deploy “career politician” as an epithet, but for Baldwin the term is both accurate and a point of pride. She readily traces some of her key legislative victories through that history.
Earlier this year, marking the passage in 2022 of the PACT Act, giving veterans exposed to toxic chemicals in conflicts going back to the Vietnam War greater access to federal benefits, Baldwin recalled her introduction to the issue through a staffer when she was still in the U.S. House.
Likewise, she frequently points to the key role she played in shaping the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
“It was my provision that allowed young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance till they turned 26,” Baldwin said during the debate, repeating a campaign talking point.
Among her most recent trophies is language in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that for the first time empowers Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs. The act also imposes caps on the out-of-pocket expenses Medicare recipients must bear and limits their cost of insulin to $35.
“We need to build upon the Affordable Care Act, and we need to build upon our efforts to negotiate lower prescription drug prices,” Baldwin said during Friday’s debate.
While health care has been among her top concerns, she also directs attention to other parts of her lawmaker’s resume.
Economy and rebuilding U.S. industry
When President Joe Biden’s administration and allies in Congress drew up the CHIPS and Science Act to support the return of technical manufacturing from overseas to the U.S., particularly in the computer chips that gave the legislation its nickname, Baldwin turned to a 2019 Brookings Institution industrial policy report.
Drawing on that document she pitched the inclusion of a “technology hub” program that would direct federal funds to support the development of specialized advanced domestic production projects.
After the bill was enacted, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. worked with Bio-Forward, a consortium of industries and institutions in the state, to propose a tech hub focused on the emerging science of tailoring medical diagnosis and treatment to the individual genetic profiles of patients. Baldwin championed the Wisconsin entry for a competitive tech hub grant, then joined an event in August to show off one of the participating businesses.
Those and other major initiatives that emerged from Congress and the White House in the first two years of the Biden administration exemplified a vision that government has a role to play working with the private sector for economic development.
The CHIPS and Science Act’s objective to revitalize domestic tech manufacturing was in the service of national and economic security in the U.S. “That takes a government investment to be able to do that,” said Lisa Johnson, Bio-Forward’s executive director at the August event.
She also has introduced her share of bills that haven’t made it out of even one house of Congress, but in some of those she’s found a measure of victory. In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission finalized a rule aimed at curbing stealth investors who try to grab control of struggling companies out from under the owners and management in order to make a quick buck.
The rule had its origins in legislation that Baldwin sponsored in 2017 after the shutdown of a paper mill in Wisconsin’s Marathon County led the village where it was located to dissolve. While the bill didn’t advance, some of its language made it into the new SEC rule.
Baldwin’s office enlisted the support of the mill’s displaced executive, who praised the persistence and patience of the senator and her staff in seeing what became the new rule through to enactment.
The story reflects Baldwin’s success at allying with a wide range of constituents with a wide range of concerns — as well as with lawmakers across the aisle, like Republican Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, with whom she’d cosponsored the original legislative proposal.
“I fight for Wisconsin and only Wisconsin,” Baldwin told the debate moderators, “which means I’ll work with Republicans or Democrats, Republican administrations or Democratic administrations — to get the job done for Wisconsin but also stand up to them.”
Tying Baldwin to Biden
Hovde’s campaign has been largely built on three arguments: that the major federal legislation signed by Biden and championed by Baldwin has been not just ineffective but harmful; that immigration is out of control and hurting the country; and that Baldwin has been an ineffective politician with nothing to show for her 12 years in office.
Along with those critiques, he’s presented himself — the scion of developers in Wisconsin and the owner of a $3 billion bank in California, where he owns a $7 million home in Laguna Beach — as an experienced business operator who can bring a fresh face to Washington.
In his arguments on the economy and on immigration, Hovde has been largely in step with Trump. Hovde, who received Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement, spoke from the stage at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, even before handily winning his party’s nomination as the designated Senate candidate, and has appeared at numerous other Trump events.
In those public appearances, including last week’s debate, Hovde has attacked the incumbent almost constantly — shaking his head as she answered the questions posted by Wisconsin journalists at the event, then accusing her of lying repeatedly without offering specifics.
Wisconsin Democrats, meanwhile, have run TV ads citing more than a dozen instances in which independent fact-checkers have accused Hovde of lying in ads and public statements.
Hovde has railed against the signature bills Biden helped shape and signed — pandemic relief, the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act.
At the debate Baldwin used Hovde’s opposition to the latter law to charge that Hovde “opposes efforts to negotiate the price of prescription drugs, saving patients and Medicare money.”
Provisions capping the out-of-pocket drug costs for Medicare patients and forcing drug companies to negotiate prices were part of the Inflation Reduction Act, she observed.
“My opponent would have voted against that measure. He’s said that many times,” Baldwin said. “We are seeing real reductions in prices that will save both patients money but will also extend the solvency of Medicare.”
Hovde took sharp offense to the assertion that he opposes negotiating drug prices, without addressing his opposition to the law that has made drug price negotiation possible. “I think drug prices are wildly too high and I’ll actually do something about it,” he said, without specifying what his response might be.
Inflation and immigration
Hovde has zeroed in on the 2021-22 inflation spike, blaming it primarily on the Biden legislation. “That’s why inflation got ignited,” he said at Friday’s debate, blaming Baldwin for “reckless spending.”
In addition to attacking Democrats on the economy, Hovde has echoed Trump’s campaign in criticizing Biden for ending a series of Trump executive orders restricting migrants.
At Friday’s debate, Hovde threw out figures for migrants in Biden’s first three years in office that added up to 10 million — a number that far exceeds any official estimates from federal agencies or non-government organizations that track immigration policy. He added, “We don’t know how many come in but it’s flooded our streets with fentanyl. We have criminals that have entered into our country and it’s created a humanitarian crisis.”
Political ads supporting Hovde have attacked Baldwin on the immigration issue.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, however, cartels mainly seek to move the drug across the border with the help of U.S. citizens.
Baldwin has endorsed a bipartisan bill that the Biden administration reached with a group of conservative Republican senators but that the U.S. House Republican leaders killed at Trump’s urging.
Hovde has defended killing the bill, calling it a sham. “It wasn’t going to change any of the asylum laws or immigration laws at all,” he said.
Baldwin countered that the defunct legislation was “the toughest border bill that we’ve seen in years,” with provisions to add 1,500 border patrol agents along the Southern U.S. border. It also included technology to scan incoming vehicles for fentanyl.
She charged that Trump, with Hovde’s support, “wanted the political issue” of the immigration controversy. “They wanted the chaos,” she said. “They didn’t want a solution.”
With the attacks and counter-attacks, what started as a 7-point lead for Baldwin in the polls has narrowed considerably, with some polls showing the two neck and neck.
Despite that, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay political scientist Aaron Weinschenk says he believes a Hovde upset is unlikely. Baldwin easily won her last reelection bid in 2018, including in Republican areas like rural Richland and Lafayette counties, which Trump carried in the last two elections but which voted for Baldwin by more than 10 points.
Baldwin “is pretty popular in Wisconsin,” Weinschenk said. “She’s like threaded the needle in appealing to people and you know different parts of the state that maybe you’d think of as being pretty Republican. It might be narrower than previous races, but I’d be surprised if she lost.”
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