Hovde hopes to take on two-term Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin in November.
National Republicans have insisted for months that they have a top-tier Senate candidate on deck to take on two-term Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin in November. As of this afternoon, he’s finally in the race.
Wisconsin banking executive and real-estate developer Eric Hovde formally announced on Tuesday his Republican candidacy for U.S. Senate in 2024, heating up a down-ballot battleground race in what’s expected to be one of the most competitive Senate and presidential battlegrounds of the cycle.
“Our country is facing enormous challenges. Our economy, our health care, crime and open borders. Everything is going in the wrong direction,” Hovde said in his video announcement, released late Tuesday morning ahead of his first campaign event this afternoon.
His announcement comes more than a decade after he ran unsuccessfully for his party’s nomination in 2012 against former Republican governor Tommy Thompson, who then lost to Baldwin in the general election. This time around, he has a number of experienced Republican operatives at the ready, as NR reported earlier this month, and is prepared to dip deep into his pockets to fund his campaign.
Should Hovde secure the GOP nomination, he will face an uphill battle against Baldwin. Democrats working to reelect her have spent several months preparing for Hovde’s launch, and plan to spend the entire cycle characterizing him as an out of touch businessman who owns a bank and multi-million-dollar home in Southern California.
And even though Baldwin votes with Biden more than 95 percent of the time, Republicans will readily admit she’s a talented fundraiser who has learned how to portray herself to voters as a moderate. She’s well-attuned to the quirks of her state, working with Republicans to urge the FDA to enforce stricter labeling requirements for imitation dairy products and remove the gray wolf from the endangered-species list in a number of states like Wisconsin, where wolves often kill farmers’ livestock.
“She works hard. She’s got a big war chest,” former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, president of the conservative youth organization Young America’s Foundation, told The Dispatch over the summer. “Even though she’s liberal, she’s got a persona in the state of Wisconsin that’s either neutral or kind of positive — not that that matches her voting record. But as we all know, perception is reality oftentimes in these races.”
Still, Republicans insist that Biden’s poor approval rating in Wisconsin will drag her down. In the past week alone, four Republican sources have separately referenced the new Marquette Law School poll of registered voters conducted in late January showing President Joe Biden and his likely 2024 rival Donald Trump tied head-to-head in Wisconsin, a state Biden narrowly carried in 2020. That same survey shows Baldwin’s favorability rating at 42 percent.
Wisconsin GOP chairman Brian Schimming believes Baldwin is in worse shape than former Democratic senator Russ Feingold was ahead of his surprising 2010 loss against Republican Ron Johnson, then a little-known plastics company executive from Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
“She can raise money at will. I don’t have any illusions about that,” Schimming said in an interview of Baldwin’s roughly $8 million on hand as of January 1. “But I think that there’s been a misnomer for a long time that this race is unwinnable, supposedly because of her incumbent strengths.”
“But that is not borne out in the Marquette poll, number one,” he continued. “Number two, she’s a 95 percent vote with Joe Biden, in a state where Joe Biden — not unlike other states — is in a lot of trouble.”
National Republicans are hoping that Hovde’s deep pockets will put Wisconsin on the map while allowing them to keep their main focus on must-win Democrat-held battlegrounds that Trump carried handily in 2020. Now that West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin’s retirement has put the Mountain State firmly in the red column, outside Republican spending groups are expected to funnel most of their resources into sending Democratic incumbents packing in Ohio and Montana.
Their job got easier last week when Republican Representative Matt Rosendale, Senate Republicans’ unsuccessful Montana Senate nominee in 2018, announced that he would suspend his bid for U.S. Senate after just one week in the race. Complicating Rosendale’s path to the nomination was the decision by Trump, just hours after Rosendale’s Senate announcement, to publicly endorse his then-primary opponent, NRSC-backed businessman Tim Sheehy.
Hovde’s hoping he can coast to victory in his state’s August primary as other Republicans — namely Franklin businessman Scott Mayer and former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. — continue to float prospective runs.
Mayer told NR last week the NRSC’s decision to rally behind Hovde is will have no bearing on whether or not he jumps into the primary. But he also walked back comments he’d made earlier last week during an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in which he’d suggested that he’d already hired staff for a soon-to-launch campaign. “I have people lined up ready to go in the event that I run,” Mayer clarified in an interview with National Review. “I wouldn’t hire anybody until I have an actual campaign.”
Forces in Hovde’s orbit have begun to send signals that Mayer ought to think twice before throwing his hat in the ring.
“Republicans have lined up tens of millions of dollars to destroy Scott Mayer if he chooses to continue down this path,” a national Republican strategist told NR last week.