Can Hovde Beat Baldwin?

Eric Hovde.

The announcement last week that Eric Hovde would enter the race for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Tammy Baldwin was unintentionally funny: “Eric Hovde is a successful businessman now ready for the U.S. Senate,” it declared.

Yes, he’s now ready after nearly a year of speculation and many hints that he intended to run. The fact that it took him so long to decide doesn’t convey much confidence he thinks he can win. Not to mention that Hovde’s name has been floated repeatedly as a candidate for statewide elections ever since he ran and lost the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator to Tommy Thompson in 2012, who proceeded to lose to Baldwin in the general election.

In short, Hovde’s entrance into this year’s race felt like old news. Didn’t we already hear he was running, casual voters might have wondered.

Still, a powerful announcement speech could have injected a jolt of lightning into the long expected campaign. Instead we got meh.

“Hovde said he was running for Senate to lower the national debt and invigorate the middle class,” as the AP reported. How many times have we heard this from candidates in the last 40 years? He also invoked Ronald Reagan, who last held office 35 years ago, as the sort of Republican Hovde admires.

The one hot button issue Hovde raised was immigration, calling for bipartisan solutions to secure the southern border. But is the border problem particularly resonant in a state located 1,944 miles away from Mexico, and whose dairy industry is highly dependent on immigrant labor?

Hovde, moreover, offered no criticism of Baldwin’s position on this issue. And we have just seen the Republicans in Congress blow up their own proposal on the border, once it became clear that President Joe Biden and Democrats would back the legislation. Needless to say, Baldwin will be reminding Hovde of this in any campaign debate.

Then there were the optics of Hovde’s speech. His announcement was made on the top-floor “Sky Club” of the luxury apartment complex his company owns in downtown Madison. Yes, that tells us he is a successful businessman, but doesn’t exactly proclaim a man-of-the-people image.

Nor was he helped by a poorly-trimmed mustache that gives him the look of a Texas law man in a B cowboy movie. He actually appeared in an old West themed advertisement, wearing a cowboy hat for his Sunwest Bank. The last person elected president with any kind of facial hair was William Howard Taft in 1908. I’m betting any political advisor Hovde consulted said get rid of the stache.

Still, for Republicans Hovde’s entry in the race was a godsend. It was getting embarrassing that no GOP candidate had yet to enter the race with just nine months left before the election. After all, Wisconsin is a swing state where a big win is a 1% margin. And Baldwin, in theory, seems beatable: She is one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate and is currently under water with the voters — The latest Marquette University Law School Poll showed 42 percent of respondents had a favorable view of Baldwin, while 45 percent were unfavorable. Few had heard of Hovde, the poll showed, but that can be an advantage: He’s got a chance to define himself as a fresh alternative to a candidate who has held office for 37 years, including 24 years in Congress.

But so far it has been the Democrats defining Hovde, pounding him with attacks for the last 10 months. A key theme has been Hovde as a carpetbagger, identifying him “Eric Hovde (R-Laguna Beach),” who owns an ocean-view mansion there and runs a California bank he has called his “main business.” Hovde has insisted he is a Wisconsin resident, but has been named one of Orange County’s most influential people three years in a row and is a local California celebrity with his popular California TV commercials. Meanwhile, he has failed to vote in Wisconsin for 17 of the last 30 elections, as Dan Bice reported.

Given this repeated attacks, you’d think Hovde would take care to emphasize his Wisconsin orientation. Yet he began his announcement speech declaring he was running because “It’s very simple. I love my country.” It wasn’t until a third of the way into his 19-minute speech that he mentioned Wisconsin. All told, I counted three mentions of the state he wants to represent. And his first campaign ad never mentioned Wisconsin.

Democrats have also been slamming Hovde as so wealthy he is out of touch with average voters. Hovde owns a $2.8 billion bank and his California mansion is a $7 million estate in the ultra-wealthy Emerald Bay area, in a gated community so exclusive it has its own fire department, a private yacht anchorage and 24/7 security. Hovde spent some time in his speech describing how his Norwegian ancestors emigrated to America with “nothing” and made good. But does that make Hovde himself a regular guy?

As if all of that wasn’t enough, Hovde also took several policy positions in 2012 that have not worn well: Hovde declared he was “totally opposed to abortion” and called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, that by now has become very popular, providing needed coverage to 35 million people. He also argued that Social Security must be trimmed by raising the eligibility age over time to 72 years old. More recently, in 2017, he went on a conservative talk show and declared that he backed a hike in taxes for some 72 million Americans, including retirees and low-income earners.

That is an awful lot of baggage to overcome. But it probably won’t matter if he doesn’t shave off that mustache.