It seems that Eric Hovde has no idea why he is running for a U.S. Senate position. His incoherent message in a state where he is out-of-touch is a reflection of a Republican Party that is in disarray.
It seems like Eric Hovde does n’t know why he’s running for a U. S. Senate seat. His inconsistent social message reveals a dysfunctional Republican Party in a state he is out of touch with. It seems like Eric Hovde does n’t know why he’s running for a U. S. Senate seat. His uncoherent social message in a state where he lacks connection offers a glimpse into a dysfunctional Republican Party.
It seems that Eric Hovde has no idea why he is running for a U.S. Senate position. His incoherent message in a state where he is out-of-touch is a reflection of a Republican Party that is in disarray.
In mid-February, millionaire Eric Hovde made a much-anticipated announcement that he intends to challenge incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.. . Leaders of Wisconsin’s Republican Party had been courting Hovde for the past year, but according to a Republican political consultant I spoke with, he was lukewarm about running. It probably helped that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly put Hovde on his list of favorite candidates to help Republicans retake control of the Senate.. . So, on February 20, Hovde pulled together his supporters in a building he owns in downtown Madison and declared his candidacy. It was not at all clear that his heart was in it.. . At the Hovde Building, assembled friends, family, and business associates waited, listening to an acoustic guitar soundtrack for twenty minutes past the announced start time before his brother, Steve, walked on stage to introduce him, emphasizing that the family does, in fact, hail from Wisconsin.. . Hovde, looking like Tom Selleck with a thick mustache and unbuttoned shirt, delivered a boilerplate speech invoking the American Dream and Ronald Reagan that drew a few, brief smatterings of polite applause. There were no zingers and no real indication why he’s running besides the requisite “I love my country.”. . To be fair, Hovde’s campaign was likely reeling from a barrage of bad news in the run-up to the announcement.. . . Steve Hovde’s reassurances that his brother grew up in Madison and “bleeds Wisconsin Badgers and Green Bay Packers,” seemed designed to deflect recent news that reinforced Hovde’s image as an out-of-state millionaire dabbling in Wisconsin politics. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Hovde’s transfer of his $2.3 million home in Washington, D.C., to a family trust that his brother manages. Hovde also owns a $7 million mansion in Laguna Beach, California, a short drive from the headquarters of the bank he owns. The California house, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Dan Bice pointed out, is worth more than three times what Hovde paid for his suburban Madison home on the shores of Lake Mendota.. . Bice also noted that Hovde, who has a spotty voting record, voted absentee from California in the 2023 spring supreme court race in Wisconsin. Wisconsin Democrats gleefully refer to him as “California bank owner Eric Hovde (R-Laguna Beach).”. . Shortly after his announcement, the state Democratic Party released a video featuring cast members from The Real Housewives of Orange County (where Hovde’s mansion is located) urging him to come home to California where he belongs.. . But the biggest blow to Hovde’s campaign announcement came from the Hovde campaign itself, which launched an inaugural television ad in which the candidate fails to make even a passing reference to the state of Wisconsin.. . Eric Hovde, looking like Tom Selleck with a thick mustache and unbuttoned shirt, delivered a boilerplate speech invoking the American Dream and Ronald Reagan.. . After drawing a barrage of incredulous reactions on social media, the campaign was quickly regrouping and apparently did not have time to rethink the theme music for Hovde’s announcement. After his brother finished naming Wisconsin sports teams, Hovde bounded on stage to the tune of “Life Is a Highway.” Not the ideal jingle for someone trying to shake off the image of a carpetbagger.. . The creaky start to the Hovde Senate bid is, in part, a reflection of the candidate himself, who needed a lot of persuasion to run and finally convinced himself to leave California on the strength of his conviction that, as he put it, “everywhere I look today in my country, I see it failing,” and Hovde is just the man to fix it.. . He sounded like he was running for President against Joe Biden.. . Hovde wants to defend “the American dream” and “freedom and liberty.” He is alarmed by the decline in “domestic security,” which he blames on the “defund the police” movement and an influx of immigrants to the southern border. He wants to do something about the national debt and inflation, which is “hammering our middle and working class and our elderly who live on fixed incomes.” Most importantly, he added, “we’re leaving our children and our grandchildren saddled with all this debt, not leaving them better off.”. . But it’s hard to imagine that concern for the financial security of the Hovde children is what propelled their megamillionaire dad to run for Senate.. . . In addition to a candidate who doesn’t seem to quite know why he’s running, the incoherence of Hovde’s political message is partly a reflection of a Republican Party in disarray.. . Take immigration, a major theme of Republican national campaigns this year. Demagoguery about an “invasion” of immigrants from Latin America conflicts with the economic reality of U.S. employers’ heavy dependence on immigrant labor—especially in Wisconsin, where an estimated 70 percent of the workers propping up the state’s dairy industry are undocumented immigrants. Hovde began his speech with a lengthy retelling of his family story, invoking his impoverished immigrant great-grandparents and their “bold decision to go pursue that American dream.” He said they were like other immigrants to the United States who made this country what it is by fleeing “tyranny and oppression” and pursuing “the dream to have some prosperity and to make a better life for your children.”. . Then he pivoted to his plan to pull up the drawbridge behind him. “We don’t have the housing nor the medical services and infrastructure to care for our own citizens, much less nine to twelve million [new immigrants]—that’s basically double Wisconsin in three years.”. . Hovde didn’t seem to notice the dissonance between his romantic invocation of his own family’s immigrant past and his hardheaded declaration that we must close the door on the immigrants who are coming here now, fleeing tyranny and seeking a better life.. . Likewise, his lament that toxic partisanship has gripped the country over the last three and a half years contained no acknowledgement that former President Donald Trump, whom Hovde has endorsed, encouraged a violent mob to invade the U.S. Capitol to overturn the results of the last presidential election, and continues to use ever more inflammatory rhetoric in his current campaign.. . Despite his pledge to rise above partisan politics, Hovde’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act and his absolutist anti-abortion stance—pledging to protect life starting at conception and supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade, as the Republicans prepare to push for a national abortion ban—puts him on the far right end of the political spectrum.. . None of that is Hovde’s biggest problem, though.. . Hovde’s greatest challenge is that he is not running for President against Biden. He’s running for a U.S. Senate seat against Tammy Baldwin, a formidable incumbent.. . Baldwin regularly racks up big wins in Republican-leaning districts because she does precisely what Hovde doesn’t seem to know is required—taking a deep and detailed interest in the minutiae of Wisconsin. Traveling to every small town, dairy farm, and manufacturing plant in the state, donning protective goggles and mud-splattered overalls, Baldwin is continually meeting her constituents and delivering the goods—millions of dollars for a dairy business innovation program, buy America requirements for Navy ships that benefit Wisconsin manufacturers, and funding for regional tech hubs that are a boon to Wisconsin business. She is always bringing home the bacon.. . That specific, deep knowledge and connection with the people of Wisconsin, and tenacious support for the state’s economic interests, is going to be hard to beat with platitudes about freedom and prosperity, or a cringy invocation of the needs of the “middle and working class” by a guy who doesn’t look like he’s spent much time around the people he’s talking about.. . . There’s a long way to go before the 2024 elections. But in the teetering swing state of Wisconsin, where Trump and Biden both won election by narrow margins in 2016 and 2020, respectively, there is a renewed sense of optimism among Democrats and progressives.. . For the first time in more than a decade, Wisconsin now has voting maps that roughly reflect the fifty-fifty partisan split in the state. Republicans are about to lose their gerrymandered control of the state legislature. After a new progressive majority on the state supreme court threw out the old voting maps and began considering new options, Republicans saw the writing on the wall and rushed to pass maps drafted by Democratic Governor Tony Evers, instead of taking their chances that the court might choose one of the more Democratic-leaning options.. . “This is a sea change moment in Wisconsin politics,” Ben Wikler, chair of the state Democratic Party, told me. “We’ve been living in something less than a democracy for the last thirteen years. And now we have a set of state legislative maps that mean that if one party does well in an election, they win the majority . . . . It is a spectacular, spectacular shift for the better.”. . Wikler predicts that Democrats running in Wisconsin’s newly competitive state legislative districts will have “reverse coattails”—pulling along the Democrats at the top of the ticket.. . “There will be some voters this fall in Wisconsin who have a chance to cast a single ballot that flips a state assembly seat, a state senate seat, a Congressional seat, re-elects a Senator, and re-elects a President,” Wikler said. “Those are some of the most powerful ballots that anyone has had in the history of American democracy.”. . Compared to those energized voters reclaiming their power, the millionaire running for Senate in Wisconsin looks positively bankrupt.
