Eric Hovde, a Wisconsin businessman, announced his campaign for Democrat Tammy Baldwin’s Senate seat on Tuesday, giving Republicans a prominent candidate in the state after two incumbent congressmen declined to run.
“Do you feel like America is slipping away?” Mr. Hovde said in his announcement video. “Our country is facing enormous challenges. Our economy, our healthcare, crime and open borders – everything is going in the wrong direction. Washington just divides us and talks about who is to blame and nothing is done.”
“I believe we must come together and find commonsense solutions to restore America,” he added in the video, which did not mention Ms. Baldwin or any other Democrats or Republicans.
Mr. Hovde, the multimillionaire founder of H Bancorp LLC and chief executive of a real estate development company, is the most prominent candidate so far in the Republican race. He has run for Senate once before, losing the Republican primary in 2012, and considered running for Senate in 2018 and governor in 2022, but decided against it.
Wisconsin is in the second tier of Republican voting destinations this year as the party seeks to gain control of the Senate. It’s a sharply divided state where Donald J. Trump won in 2016 but Joseph R. Biden Jr. won in 2020 – and where a Democratic governor won re-election in 2022 – and it poses a greater challenge for Republicans than red states Montana, Ohio and West Virginia. But it should be competitive.
Ms. Baldwin quickly used the news of Mr. Hovde’s entry to appeal for campaign donations, posting on social media that this “will be my most competitive and expensive race yet.” A spokesman for the Wisconsin Democratic Party said in a statement that Mr. Hovde would put “ultra-wealthy people like him ahead of middle-class Wisconsinites” and vote for a ban on abortion, a cut in Social Security benefits and a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
Both answers also hit on a point that Democrats are likely to emphasize in the coming months: Mr. Hovde owns real estate in California, where the bank he chairs is based, and has split his time between the two states, even though he is registered there and has been voting at his home in Wisconsin since 2012.
Representatives Mike Gallagher and Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, Republicans who were considered potential recruits, said last year that they would not challenge Ms. Baldwin.
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2024-02-21 13:14:04
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