Republican Eric Hovde says momentum is on his side in latest US Senate bid

Republican Eric Hovde leaned heavily on his business acumen when he first ran for U.S. Senate more than a decade ago. This year, as he campaigns against Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, he’s again worn it on his sleeve.

As he toured a cranberry farm in Tomah this September, Hovde peppered owner Bill Bosshard and his wife Diane with questions, from how their crops have handled this year’s rainfall to whether they buy their own bees to pollinate plants. When Hovde heard the couple and their kids go to work washing and packaging millions of pounds of berries each fall, he perked up.

 “That’s a family business!” Hovde exclaimed. “That’s impressive!”

“I don’t know if my kids are that excited about it,” Bill Bosshard replied. “But they will show up.”

While Hovde’s pitch to voters didn’t quite work during his first campaign for Senate in 2012, political circumstances are different this year, and there are signs that Wisconsin’s race could be up for grabs.

His supporters understand the stakes. In an interview, Bosshard told WPR he’s keenly aware of the GOP’s quest to flip Democrats’ narrow majority in the U.S. Senate by winning seats in places like Montana, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

“This is one of the Senate races that’s going to decide who is in charge for the next two years,” Bosshard said.

Hovde’s message is that Washington D.C. needs fewer career politicians, a term he uses to describe Baldwin, and an attack that’s reminiscent of one Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson used to win his race a decade-and-a-half ago.

“I think I’m resonating because I’m talking about issues that matter to them,” Hovde said of Wisconsin voters. “I hear their concerns: inflation, the price of their food, the price of gasoline, housing, access to housing, the cost of housing.”

Baldwin has consistently led Hovde in public polling, but over the last month, the race appears to have tightened. With Election Day in sight, he says momentum is on his side.

Typical Madison kids, and a pet alligator

For Hovde, who helped build his family’s real estate company and now runs a chain of banks out West, business is a big part of his life story, not to mention his political brand. 

Along with his late father, Donald, and brother, Steve, the Hovdes grew a Madison-based real estate and financial services company into an empire of businesses with a national footprint.  A financial disclosure form filed with the U.S. Senate in July shows that Eric Hovde, who is now CEO of Salt Lake City-based Sunwest Bank, has a net worth of somewhere between $195.5 million and $564.4 million.

In an interview with WPR, Hovde said he had an “idyllic” childhood growing up in Madison, where he attended East High School and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said his father was often working while his mother stayed at home to raise him and his four siblings.

Back then, Hovde said he and his friends would spend their days outdoors, riding bikes, swimming or rock climbing. In college, he said he got into martial arts starting with Taekwondo and later training in Brazilian jiu jitsu.

“I’m a super high energy guy,” Hovde said. “Anybody that knows me knows I just got a ton of energy.”

Hovde’s oldest brother and longtime business partner, Steve, said the boys “made our mom crazy” with their tussling and penchant for collecting snakes they’d find near the house. The already bustling house was also home to several pets including dogs, hamsters and guinea pigs. But Steve said the weirdest animal they ever had in the house was a pet alligator their grandfather bought in Florida.

He said the gator grew quickly to more than 2 feet long and every now and then it would escape.  

“It would get out of its aquarium from time to time and run around on the floor of the kitchen and the living room,” Steve Hovde said. “My mom would be screaming, and us boys would have to go catch the alligator as it would snap at us.”

This year, Steve Hovde has been working to get his brother elected. He said he’s behind the Fix Washington political action committee, which has run ads attacking Baldwin. Federal Election Commission reports show he’s donated $2 million to the effort, which has also received $1 million from Pleasant Prairie-based Uline co-owner Elizabeth Uihlein.

“I did it simply because I love my brother and want to support him,” Hovde said. “It stinks. I can’t wait until the election is over with. I call myself a professional beggar.”

MS diagnosis and The Hovde Foundation

In 1991, Eric Hovde was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He said he “went through a lot of difficult years” with the disease.

“Used to pray to God, ‘God, just give me ’til 40, so my daughters can know the man I am,’” Hovde said. “And ironically, at 40, God changed the course in my MS, and my MS has been largely stable now for 20 years.”

His brother said the disease changed Hovde’s life and led the two to create the Hovde Foundation, which was first aimed at funding research to find a cure. But in 2000, during a charitable trip to Kosovo with their employees, Hovde said they were moved by the plight of abandoned children living on the streets.

The brothers decided to shift the foundation’s focus to helping vulnerable children and adults around the world through partnerships with local nonprofits to build and maintain what the foundation calls “Hovde Homes.” They’re located in Central and South America and Africa, along with a house for homeless mothers in Madison.

Nicole Bice is the Hovde Foundation’s executive director. She told WPR the nonprofit writes grants worth up to $2 million to build and staff the homes each year.

“People don’t necessarily see that side of them,” Bice said of the Hovdes. “We don’t have a marketing budget. We don’t plaster our logo everywhere. That’s not the point of the giving.”

Undeterred by a 2012 loss

Hovde has never held public office. In 2012, he placed second in a four-way GOP primary won by former Gov. Tommy Thompson. Baldwin ultimately defeated Thompson by around 5.5 percentage points in the general election, keeping the seat left vacant by retiring U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl in Democratic hands.

Hovde said his decision to run that year was fueled, in part, by frustration over the federal government’s response to the housing market crash and subsequent Great Recession of 2008. He said he took the loss in stride.

“I wasn’t bitter at all,” he said. “In fact, I was like, ‘Wow, I almost won this thing.’”

Hovde said he decided to run for Senate again this year after watching Democrats pass trillions of dollars in federal spending through the American Rescue Plan Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act led to his decision to mount another Senate run.

“Watching the insane spending that has been going on for the last four years, I’m like, ‘We’re headed rapidly into a debt trap, and we’re bankrupting our country,’” Hovde said.

Unlike in 2012, Hovde didn’t face an expensive and bruising Republican primary this year. His ability to self-fund a campaign, coupled with an early endorsement by former President Donald Trump, effectively cleared the GOP field.

Still, Jessica Taylor with the Cook Political Report said Hovde “was a little slow out of the gate.”

Almost immediately after he entered the race, Baldwin and her Democratic allies began using Hovde’s own words against him. They’ve inundated airwaves with attack ads using comments he made during his 2012 run for U.S. Senate stating he was in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade and was “totally opposed to abortion.” This year, Hovde has pivoted on the abortion issue, saying people early in their pregnancies should have a right to make a choice. 

Hovde has also spent time defending against comments he made earlier this year saying “almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote” while echoing Republican concerns about voter turnout at some Wisconsin facilities during the 2020 election.

Baldwin and Democrats have also run ads accusing Hovde of not being from Wisconsin while mentioning the out-of-state bank he runs and the multi-million dollar estate he owns in California. In response, Hovde posted a video of himself bathing in an ice-covered Lake Mendota while challenging Baldwin to do the same.

Typically, Taylor said, campaigns let those things go, under the political adage that “if you’re sort of explaining, you’re losing.”

“I think he’s sort of shifting now,” Taylor said. “He’s not putting himself as much front and center, and he’s making the race about Baldwin. Which, when it’s a race about an incumbent, that’s sort of what you want to do.”

Hovde’s latest ads accuse Baldwin of being a radical liberal who supported giving “government checks to illegal immigrants,” and pushed “high schools to allow boys to compete in girls sports.” Another ad accuses Baldwin of having a conflict of interest for sitting on a Senate committee that oversees an industry that her partner works in.

Hovde has paid for much of the advertising himself. According to the last publicly-available campaign finance reports, he’d contributed $13 million to his campaign.

Trump could be the X factor

Recent surveys show Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race tightening, and The Cook Political Report now rates it as a “Toss Up.”

Still, Wisconsin Republican strategist Bill McCoshen says incumbent U.S. senators are “very hard to beat,” particularly Baldwin, who has defied the odds by maintaining a small, but notable block of support from Republican voters.

A Marquette University Law School poll released Oct. 2 found that 5 percent of voters identifying as Republicans said they preferred Baldwin over Hovde. McCoshen said those Republicans will likely vote for former Republican President Donald Trump in the upcoming election, enough to potentially tip the balance in a close election.

“Hovde can’t have that,” McCoshen said. “He has to have every single Trump supporter on his side in order to win.”

McCoshen said when Hovde entered the Senate race in February, it was an open question whether Trump’s endorsement would help or hurt his cause. Now, he said, Trump’s support is definitely a benefit and Hovde “should be hugging him” in the final days before Nov. 5.

During a raucous Trump campaign rally in Juneau on Sunday, the former president invited Hovde to the stage during his speech. A fired up Hovde called Trump a great real estate developer and rallied the crowd to help push both of them to victory in Wisconsin.

“So, all of you, go work hard, go grab every friend, colleague, neighbor, and let’s restore this country and get president trump and me to Washington,” Hovde said. “Let’s go folks!” 

Editor’s note: Read WPR’s profile of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin here.

WPR’s Hope Kirwan contributed reporting.