Republican officials struggled for a while to find a credible challenger to run against Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, but the party received some good news this week: Wealthy businessman Eric Hovde officially kicked off his candidacy.
As is usually the case, Democrats welcomed the multi-millionaire to the race by circulating evidence of Hovde endorsing entitlement cuts, taking a far-right line on abortion rights, and vowing to try to “defund every aspect“ of the Affordable Care Act. But as NBC News reported, the party seemed especially interested in an unexpected part of the Republican candidate’s background: where he lives.
Wasting no time in continuing that strategy, the Wisconsin Democratic Party criticized Hovde within moments of his launch, dubbing him as “California Hovde,” because he owns a $7 million property in Laguna Beach and has lived in the state on-and-off since 2012.
“California bank owner Eric Hovde is running for Senate to impose his self-serving agenda, putting ultra rich people like himself ahead of middle-class Wisconsinites,” Democratic Party of Wisconsin rapid response director Arik Wolk said in a statement. “California Hovde’s self-serving agenda and attacks on Wisconsinites’ freedoms are exactly why Wisconsinites will reject him and send him back to his $7 million California mansion.”
The pushback comes nearly a year after The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a column with a memorable headline: “Eric Hovde may run for Senate in Wisconsin, but he’s living large in Laguna Beach, California.” The same piece added, “Hovde was named by the Orange County Business Journal as one of its 500 most influential people in Orange County in 2020.”
Orange County, of course, is roughly 2,000 miles away from Wisconsin.
Time will tell whether voters in the Badger State are concerned about the “California Hovde” criticisms, but stepping back, it’s hard not to notice the familiarity of the circumstances.
In early January, The Washington Post reported that Christie Roberts, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said she was watching the “amount of GOP Senate candidates who are just rich guys with tenuous connections to the states they are running in.” Evidently, she has plenty of candidates to choose from. To be sure, sometimes these criticisms are more effective than others. In 2022, for example, Dr. Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign in Pennsylvania struggled with the fact that he apparently lived in New Jersey, but in the same cycle, Ohioans didn’t much seem to care about J.D. Vance having lived in California. That said, Politico, looking ahead to the 2024 cycle, wrote last year, “A number of 2024 Senate candidates in competitive races have a carpetbagger problem,” and there’s ample evidence to bolster the point.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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