Eric Hovde’s weirdly lackluster Senate bid

The most significant statewide race of 2024 — apart from the presidential contest in our teetering swing state — began taking shape Tuesday when multimillionaire Eric Hovde made his much-anticipated announcement that he intends to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin. 

Hovde, the favorite of Wisconsin’s Republican establishment, took a long time to make up his mind about running. 

In his announcement speech in Madison Tuesday, it was not at all clear that his heart is in it. 

Assembled friends, family and supporters waited, listening to an acoustic guitar soundtrack, for 20 minutes past the announced start time at the Hovde Building in downtown Madison before Hovde’s brother Steve came on stage to introduce him, emphasizing that the family does, in fact, hail from Wisconsin.

Hovde, looking like Tom Selleck with his 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. He delivered no zingers and gave no indication why he’s running besides the requisite “I love my country” and a few jabs at the Biden administration for withdrawing from Afghanistan and driving up the national debt.

To be fair, the 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 [red] 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 Tuesday on Hovde’s transfer of his $2.3 million home in Washington, DC,  to a family trust that his brother Steve 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 notes 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).”

But the biggest blow to Hovde’s announcement Monday came from the Hovde campaign itself, which launched an inaugural campaign ad yesterday in which Hovde fails to make even a passing reference to the state of Wisconsin.

After hastily regrouping, the campaign 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 seems like a reflection of a candidate who needed a lot of persuasion to run and finally convinced himself to leave his Laguna Beach mansion on the strength of his conviction that, as he put it, “everywhere I look today in my country, I see it failing,” and that he is the man to fix it.

In his announcement speech, Hovde sounded like he was running for president against Joe Biden.

He 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 on the southern border. And he wants to do something about the national debt and inflation, which, he says, is “hammering our middle and working class and our elderly who live on fixed incomes. … And most importantly to me, we’re leaving our children and our grandchildren saddled with all this debt, not leaving them better off.”

It’s hard to imagine that concern for the financial security of the Hovde children is what propelled their mega-millionaire dad to run for the U.S. Senate.

The incoherence of Hovde’s political message is partly a reflection of a political party in disarray. Take the immigration issue, where Republicans have been ratcheting up the demagoguery lately while failing to enact any actual policy solutions.

Hovde began his announcement 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,” like other immigrants to the U.S. 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. “We don’t have the housing nor the medical services and infrastructure to care for our own citizens, much less nine to 12 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 hard-headed 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, the leader of Hovde’s party, encouraged a violent mob to invade the U.S. Capitol to try 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 Republicans prepare to push for a national abortion ban, put him at odds with most Wisconsinites.

None of that is Hovde’s biggest problem, however.

Hovde’s biggest problem is that he is not running for president against Joe Biden. He’s running for a U.S. Senate seat against Tammy Baldwin, one of the most formidable incumbents in that body.

Baldwin regularly racks up big wins in Republican districts because she does precisely what Hovde doesn’t seem to know is required — taking a deep and detailed interest in the minutia of Wisconsin. Marching through 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 benefitting Wisconsin manufacturers, 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.

We’ll see how the campaign shapes up.

But right from the kick-off, Hovde has a lot of ground to make up.