U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin (Screenshot | Democratic National Convention YouTube channel)

Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin has won a third term, defeating Republican California bank owner and part-time Wisconsin resident Eric Hovde in a contest characterized by relentless attacks on the part of both candidates.

With 99% of the ballots counted, Baldwin won with 49.4% of the vote and a margin of just under 30,000 votes, less than 1 percentage point ahead of Hovde, who finished with 48.5%. The Associated Press called the race for Baldwin at 12:42 p.m. Wednesday.

Baldwin declared victory eight hours earlier. “It is clear that the voters have spoken and our campaign has won,” she said in a statement released at 4:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Baldwin built on a continuing track record of success across Wisconsin, including carrying counties generally dominated by Republicans. In this year’s campaign, she also became the first statewide Democratic candidate to receive the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.

Tuesday’s election concluded a grueling campaign dominated by attacks in which Baldwin started with a lead of about 7 percentage points that dwindled in the final months. 

Democrats early on painted Hovde, who was raised in Madison, as a California carpetbagger, pointing to his ownership of a bank based in Orange County and a multimillion-dollar mansion in Laguna Beach. Team Baldwin also highlighted numerous past statements from Hovde that they portrayed as denigrating nursing home residents, college students and farmers, among others.

Hovde, meanwhile, characterized Baldwin as a career politician with little to show for her two terms in the Senate and a tenure that included more than a decade in Congress and before that in the Wisconsin Assembly and the Dane County Board.

Baldwin was also likely helped by one of her core messages, focusing on reproductive rights in the post-Roe era. Baldwin has authored a bill to codify federal protections for abortion. Her campaign highlighted Hovde’s past anti-abortion statements and his championing the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended the federal right to abortion that had been declared in the landmark decision Roe v. Wade.

This report has been updated.