by Erik Gunn, Wisconsin Examiner
August 15, 2024
On the day after he handily won the official Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Eric Hovde held forth at a Madison lunch Wednesday to discuss his policy priorities in the race and defend former President Trump’s White House record. Along the way he railed against Democrats for innumerable “lies” in their campaign messaging and at the press for glossing over them.
Hovde is running to unseat Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who is seeking her third term. In a one-hour interview with Jeff Mayers of WisPolitics, Hovde dismissed Baldwin as a “career politician,” but with few exceptions spent little time discussing the incumbent.
Hovde zeroed in on the accusation that he’s faced from the day he entered the race, denouncing Democratic messaging portraying him as an out-of-state interloper.
Although he owns a home in southern California as well as Sunwest Bank located there, Hovde noted that he pays state income taxes in Wisconsin and accused the state Democratic party of obtaining his tax returns from the Wisconsin Department of Revenue (something explicitly permitted under Wisconsin law).
Hovde also referred to his work developing real estate property in Madison and, at one point, to philanthropic donations his charitable foundation has made in the Madison area.
“Everybody here knows I’m not a Californian,” said Hovde. “I’ve never been a resident of the state of California one year in my life, and they [Democrats] spent $5 or $6 million telling people I’m a Californian because I’ve been successful. And I bought a bank in California — and by the way, I moved the headquarters of the bank out of California four years ago. I couldn’t stand dealing with California politics.” (Sunwest now has its headquarters in Utah.)
Hovde also flatly denied another recurring Democratic talking point, expressed in an Aug. 9 press release from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin asserting that “foreign banks and governments have filled Hovde’s bank with millions of dollars in deposits.” The press release linked to a news report that cited federal government reports filed by the bank.
“I don’t have any investments by foreign countries in my bank,” Hovde told one audience member. “It’s just another made-up nonsense.”
Asked about Hovde’s statement, Arik Wolk, rapid response director for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said in an email message, “Eric Hovde continues to hide the truth about his finances from Wisconsin voters. Which foreign governments and banks are depositing money into his bank, if he paid income taxes in California, and how he would avoid being a walking conflict of interest if he wins.”
Recession fears and immigration
Hovde told Mayers that he considers the economy and illegal immigration to be the top issues in the 2024 election.
Mayers asked Hovde about a report Wednesday morning showing that annual inflation in July had dropped to 2.9%.
“The bigger issue is, we’re not getting a pullback on prices, and this is where people get lost on the topic,” Hovde said. “The rate of prices going up is coming down, but prices have not come down. We have basically devalued people’s purchasing power by 22% in a three-and-a-half-year time period.”
Notwithstanding lower inflation and continued economic expansion, Hovde declared that the perception by a majority of people surveyed that the country is in recession deserves more attention.
“I think we are on the verge” of a recession, he asserted, suggesting as well that it might have already started, but that economists typically don’t identify a recession’s start until months later. “I think we are either in it or very close.”
In response to an audience question later about his first priorities if Republicans win the White House in November and both houses of Congress, Hovde said he believed tackling federal debt headed the list and that government spending should be cut back to its level in 2019.
He said there should be a new round of deregulation, asserting that it “really ignited the economy” when Ronald Reagan was president in the 1980s.
Hovde said that after the economy, “the second biggest issue that people talk to me about is the border and all the consequences around the border.”
Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. number “anywhere from a minimum of 10 million, and most sheriffs on the southern border will say that number is more like 13 to 16 million people,” he asserted.
He blamed them for straining health care and housing access, as well as for “all the crime that has unfolded.” He tied the spread of the drug fentanyl, which he blamed for killing more than 100,000 people a year in recent years, to lax border security.
Asked whether he agreed with Trump on a policy of “mass deportation,” Hovde demurred. More people should be deported, prioritizing those with criminal backgrounds, he said. But “to think we’re ever going to deport 10 to 16 million people would be impossible.”
The U.S. should make legal immigration easier, he said, with a time frame for “an up and down answer” as to whether someone “has a prospect of coming into this country,” requirements for admission and a timeline for the process.
“I’m a believer in legal immigration,” Hovde said. “Our legal immigration process is fundamentally broken, so we’ve got to face that, and we have to close the illegal immigration process.”
Abortion, contraception and the polls
On abortion, Hovde defended the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and rejected a federally protected right to abortion. The decision sent the issue “back to the states,” he said approvingly.
Hovde said he opposes abortion but believes the law should make exceptions.
“I’ve always agreed with exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother, and I agree that early on in the woman’s pregnancy, she should have a right to do,” he said.
Asked to define the limit for “early on” in pregnancy, he stopped short, but held up Western European countries for having “resolved this decades ago.”
“It’s somewhere in that first trimester time, or the very beginning of the second trimester,” Hovde said.
Anti-abortion activists have been openly seeking a national abortion ban but Hovde said that “the only way that will ever happen” would be for one party to control the White House and both houses of Congress.
He said Wisconsin should hold a referendum to decide the legality of abortion in the state, although there’s currently no mechanism for enacting statutes that way here.
When Mayers asked whether women in states where the procedure is outlawed should be free to travel to states where it is legal if they want an abortion, Hovde seemed to suggest that was a non-issue because the vast majority of abortions are induced with medication and that people can easily get medication through the mail anywhere in the U.S.
In his answer he referred to medication abortion as “the day-after pill.” During the audience question period later, a listener corrected him, pointing out that the “morning after pill” does not induce abortion and that the drugs used for medication abortion are not the same.
“I understand that there’s two different kinds of pills,” Hovde replied.
When the same audience member asked his views on contraceptives, Hovde said, “I have no problem with contraception.”
Mayers asked him about access to contraception. “Look, that’s a tricky issue,” Hovde replied. “There’s people that have great difficulty with that.” Then after a moment, he said, “I am supportive of that — of access.”
The most recent polls show Baldwin with a lead of about seven percentage points over Hovde among voters surveyed. Hovde denied any concern over the fact that no poll has shown him in ahead in the race.
“I feel really good about where I am,” he said. “And the heart of this campaign will now start getting litigated, as people are tuning in and becoming much more conscious.”
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