WASHINGTON — In a new TV commercial, U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde points to his childhood home, his alma maters East High and UW-Madison, his office building, and his family home — all to prove that he grew up in Wisconsin and is not a carpetbagger.
“I’m a fourth generation Wisconsinite,” he says in the ad.
Hovde is the Republican businessman running against Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin.
For months, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has hammered Hovde for his ties to California.
“Eric Hovde spent most of his adult life anywhere but Wisconsin,” said Arik Wolk, the rapid response director for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. “He lived in Washington DC for 24 years and then shipped off to California to run his West Coast bank from his Laguna Beach mansion. Maybe if he spent more time in Wisconsin, he’d stop insulting the hard-working people of this state every time he speaks.”
It’s true that Hovde spent more than two decades in Washington, D.C. and owns a home and business in California. But he did grow up in Wisconsin and has lived there since 2011, before he last ran for Senate and lost.
“Populations in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan and, you know, some of the other Midwestern or northeastern states, generally speaking they have a higher percentage of people who live in those states who actually were born there,” said Kyle Kondik, with the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “So, maybe there's kind of like a parochial, kind of local pride thing, that potentially would make attacks on Hovde’s connections to Wisconsin, maybe more salient in a state like Wisconsin than they might be in some other kind of state. So, I could see why Democrats are trying to do this against Hovde, and I could see why Hovde would want to respond to it.”
Hovde’s newest TV spot shows one analyst that the Democrats’ narrative about his California connection is working.
“Whenever a campaign answers an attack, that means that the campaign feels it has to answer the attack,” said Mordecai Lee, professor emeritus at UW-Milwaukee. “Now, how does it feel it? Most well-funded campaigns do a lot of polling … Sometimes they do focus groups, but something happened behind the curtain that we as the public can't see. And they felt to themselves that those attacks were being so effective, and so diminishing his chances of winning the election, that they had to respond.”
The Hovde campaign suggested the ad was necessary to dispute claims that Hovde lives in California.
“If Sen. Baldwin is willing to lie to the people of Wisconsin about where Eric Hovde lives, she will lie to us about anything to keep her job as a career politician,” said Ben Voelkel with Hovde’s campaign. “The reality is Sen. Baldwin is lying because she can’t defend her record of supporting Biden’s disastrous policies that have led to inflation and open borders and are hurting Wisconsin families.”
Baldwin has been in Wisconsin politics for decades and though Hovde, the lesser known candidate, is still defining himself to voters, experts say there’s time for policy-focused commercials and attack ads.
“This is only June,” Lee said. “November is an eternity from now.”