Eric Hovde Has Another Bad Week

Eric Hovde.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde continues to be in the news. But not in a good way.

Two weeks ago the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin created a controversy with comments suggesting nearly everyone in nursing homes is not “at a point” to vote. “Well, if you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months life expectancy,” he said. “Almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote.”

This left Ben Voelkel, his campaign spokesperson, to explain that the candidate was not arguing that nursing home residents should not vote. “In no manner did Eric Hovde suggest that elderly people should not vote,” Voelkel said. “He was referring to specific cases in Racine where family members raised concerns about their loved ones voting.”

Hovde claimed that there were nursing homes where more than 100% of the residents voted. Which is not true. A Wisconsin State Journal investigation found that just one Dane County nursing home — with 12 residents — had 100 percent voter turnout, and that elsewhere turnout ranged from 42% to 91%.

Former Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar jumped on the controversy last week Tuesday, with a blog post entitled “GOP Candidate Wants to Take the Vote Away from Nursing Home Residents.”

“What’s troubling here is his desire to take away the rights of people who have spent a lifetime contributing to this country based on a physical attribute: age,” he wrote. “Even if there was some fraud, the goal should be to uncover it, not deny everyone in nursing homes the vote.”

“Is this the guy who should be a senator?”

Meanwhile, rather than letting the matter drop, Hovde went on conservative talk radio to explain that he’d been misunderstood. “They tried to say I didn’t want elderly people to vote,” Hovde said on WISN-AM. “I don’t even know how they came up with that.”

But as AP reporter Scott Bauer wrote on Saturday, Hovde also said “a large percentage” of nursing home residents “are not in the mental capacity to (vote).” Hovde made the comment on Wednesday to Meg Ellefson, the Fox radio news host in Wausau.

Also on Saturday, the New York Times offered a new and damning follow-up on the controversy, reporting that the bank Hovde leads, Utah-based Sunwest, “last month was named as a co-defendant in a California lawsuit that accuses a senior living facility partly owned by the bank of elder abuse, negligence and wrongful death.”

Hovde’s campaign called the suit meritless and said it was farcical to hold the chairman and chief executive of a bank responsible for the actions of a business that it seized in a foreclosure in 2021. But as the Times noted, “Sunwest has claimed millions of dollars in revenue from its assisted living properties, including Claremont Hacienda,” the facility named in the lawsuit.

A followup story by the Wisconsin Examiner reviewed California state records and found that Claremont Hacienda “has been cited a dozen times in the last two years by the California Department of Social Services, which licenses and monitors assisted living homes. The home has been fined $4,500.”

The department made 14 visits to the facility, Erik Gunn reported, and issued citations “for not complying with medication storage rules; taking a resident’s personal property (a cell phone); lacking required certificates in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation for two employees and lacking current certificates for two others; failing to display a required patients’ rights poster where it was publicly visible; lacking an up-to-date license for the home’s administrator, whose listed qualification also did not meet state minimum requirements according to the department; employing two people without any record that they had cleared criminal background checks; incomplete training records for five employees; and hot water in two rooms that was below the minimum required temperature.”

Those citations, along with Hovde’s comments about nursing home residents, may not help him with older voters.

But it’s not the only group of voters who might be bothered by his comments. In March, a story by the Daily Beast dug up a video of Hovde in 2012 proposing that insurance companies charge higher premiums for people living with obesity.  His comments came in the context of his opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

“You become obese, your health care is going to cost more,” he told the public affairs channel WisconsinEye.

“If they all of a sudden started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by consuming, you know, by consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavioral patterns.”

“It’s a personal choice,” he said of obesity, “but there should be consequences to those personal choices.”

There was some good news for Hovde last week. The latest Marquette poll found that Hovde’s opponent, incumbent Democratic  U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin was leading the race by 52% to 47% among registered voters. But among likely voters, the race was tied.

Beyond the headline, however, was data suggesting that as voters get to know Hovde better, his unfavorable rating is rising. A year ago just 8% of those polled had an unfavorable opinion. In the most recent poll 24% had an unfavorable opinion of Hovde, compared to 19% who had a favorable rating. Baldwin, meanwhile, was at 47% favorable and 42% unfavorable.

Hovde needs to turn that around. His recent comments aren’t helping his cause.