Eric Hovde is a silver spooner, the scion of a Wisconsin banking and real estate family. He wants to be a U.S. senator, but so far no dice.
Hovde (photo below, profiled here) lost in 2012 to a popular GOP governor, and lost again in 2024 to Sen. Tammy Baldwin (bio here), the Democratic incumbent.
Like many Republican candidates, Hovde is a sore loser. He didn’t exactly say the election was stolen by fraud, preferring the more coded language that there were “irregularities.” Now why would he think that? Let’s take a look.
Trump beat Kamala Harris by 29,687 votes (see results here). Hovde lost to Baldwin by 28,955 votes (see results here). That’s a spread of 58,682 votes. No law says you have to vote a straight party ticket.
Digging deeper, votes for Trump and Harris total 49,512 more than the votes for Hovde and Baldwin. That’s partly because more people voted for third-party candidates in the Senate election (71,068 vs. 49,294). Note these vote totals are preliminary.
Hovde’s specific complaint concerns “the last-minute absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m., flipping the outcome.” He says, “There are many troubling issues around these absentee ballots and their timing.” (See story here.)
That’s piffle. That’s merely the “red mirage” at play, where a GOP candidate leads in early returns, but is overtaken by returns from urban areas. There’s nothing mysterious or nefarious about this. Democratic voters are concentrated in cities, and it takes longer to count their votes, because there are more ballots to be counted.
Statewide, Trump got 49.64% in Wisconsin vs. 48.77% for Harris. In the Senate race, these percentages were nearly flipped, 49.4% for Baldwin vs. 48.5% for Hovde. But Baldwin didn’t get more votes than Harris; she got 4,565 fewer. As noted above, there were more third-party votes in the Senate election. And again, I’m writing this posting two weeks after the election, before final vote totals have been posted.
Returning to the “red mirage,” Milwaukee County, Wisconsin’s largest county by population, took longest to count ballots and was last to report. That’s not at all surprising, is it?
Milwaukee County has more black people (38.6%) than white people (36.1%) (read details here), and blacks vote heavily Democratic, so it’s also not surprising Harris beat Trump by 68.15% to 29.74%, and Baldwin beat Hovde by 68.94% to 28.79%, in Milwaukee County (see results here).
Hovde lost Milwaukee County, where he was swamped in the city’s black wards, by a margin of 183,684 votes.
The “red mirage” is a real thing across the country. Republicans, eager to impugn our elections and democracy itself, seize on it to claim that when they lose, the election was “stolen” in Democratic city wards, when the only thing that happened is those folks’ votes were counted, too.
That’s deeply offensive, and also very racist. It implies people in cities aren’t equal citizens and their voice doesn’t matter. More precisely, it says black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. As I wrote here after the 2020 election, Republicans think of black votes as “fraudulent.”
As I pointed out then, all of the recounts commissioned by the 2020 Trump campaign were in cities with large black populations. That’s no coincidence. Republican “voting fraud” claims typically target black voters, just as their vote suppression efforts do. It all drips with racism.
This is the game Hovde is playing when he describes Milwaukee’s ballot returns as “irregularities.” He has no evidence to back this up; this son of white privilege is merely railing against black people being allowed to vote when he says,
“Milwaukee reported approximately 108,000 absentee ballots, with Senator Baldwin receiving nearly 90% of those ballots. Statistically, this outcome seems improbable.”
It’s absolutely probable. Milwaukee is a Democratic stronghold that over the last century elected a succession of Socialist mayors. Black people commonly vote about 90% Democratic. It would be suspicious if Milwaukee County didn’t report a heavy Democratic tilt in its absentees.
We live in a time when Republicans systematically disrespect the democratic process and are pushing a white supremacist agenda. In light of that, it’s not surprising that most blacks and a fair number of Hispanics and other minorities won’t vote for them. And what we’re getting from Hovde, in essence, is whining that their votes are counted.
That’s not someone I would want representing me. Wisconsin’s voters don’t want him, either. He’s asked for the job twice, and both times they said no. Maybe if he was less racist, and more respectful of their voting rights, he’d have better luck. But it’s probably better for the people of Wisconsin if he gives up his misplaced political ambitions and sticks to what he knows, i.e. running his bank.
