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GOP Senate Candidate's 'Healer' Rhetoric May Backfire With MAGA Voters

GOP Senate Candidate's 'Healer' Rhetoric May Backfire With MAGA Voters

A multi-millionaire California bank owner aiming to oust US Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) this fall believes his campaign message of unity will win over voters, but according to a Daily Beast report, the feat may not be so easy for the GOP hedge fund manager.

Per the report, "despite all his calls for togetherness—and what some observers have deemed a 'meh' or 'weirdly lackluster' campaign kickoff—Hovde has long aligned himself with and donated to some of the most divisive and extreme Republicans."

Eric Hovde is set to be "a guest speaker alongside Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) at a Republican Party of Brown County dinner," next month, according to the Beast. "He already spoke at an event last fall with a Moms for Liberty activist and spent at least $8,000 as a sponsor of a conservative think-tank’s evening with Tucker Carlson, who used his air time to spout election fraud claims."

During his US Senate campaign launch last week, Hovde asked the audience gathered at one of his real estate company's properties, "Are you ready to be uniters and healers for your country? Are you ready to restore the American dream?"

In a similarly worded message via X (formerly Twitter), the 59-year-old wrote, "I don’t believe in the politics of destruction. That’s what has gotten us to where we are today. The worst problem facing our nation is the division. We are ripping apart our friendships and our families over politics. I’m in this fight to usher in a new brand of leadership and end politics as usual."

Supported by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the Beast notes, Hovde will soon need "to kiss the Donald’s ring, especially at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee," University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee political science professor Kathleen Dolan told the news outlet.

"For him to generate interest, and for him to help generate that turnout, I think he’s got to be more of what the Republican voters here are going to expect," Dolan said. "He doesn’t want Trump to think that he isn’t as loyal as he can be. He doesn’t want Trump to question him at all. His best chance of getting elected is to ride on Trump’s coattails and ride on any Republican wave here in Wisconsin if it appears, and he can’t do that as successfully by taking this middle road."

Dolan also raised the question, "Is it just about his own sort of self-aggrandizement, or does he really want to be Senator from Wisconsin?" Noting that Hovde "'isn’t a visible person' and has the 'carpetbagger problem,' so Democrats will be working hard to shape his introduction to potential voters."

The Beast reports Hovde first launched his bid to enter Wisconsin politics in 2012, campaigning on the message of repealing "former President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He also shared his support for overturning Roe v. Wade, saying he was 'totally opposed' to legalized abortion. His former campaign website declared, 'We must defend and protect all human life from conception to natural death.' (The site also announced he believes 'that marriage is between one man and one woman.')"

His Senate campaign over a decade later, according to the report, notes that the multi-millionaire changed his abortion stance to "saying he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the mother’s life."

Despite his efforts, Democratic Party of Wisconsin rapid response director Arik Wolk told the news outlet, "Eric Hovde will push a divisive out-of-touch agenda that bans abortion nationwide and repeals the Affordable Care Act. From bankrolling anti-choice politicians to standing with extremist figures like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Wisconsinites know Hovde is out of step with Wisconsin values."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Eric Hovde

Wisconsin GOP Senate Wannabe Keeps Predicting Recessions That Don't Happen

Sunwest Bank CEO Eric Hovde, a potential challenger to Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, is slated to address the bank’s Annual Economic Forum in Newport Beach, California, on Thursday.

Hovde will deliver the keynote address at the event, an announcement for which says that attendees will “Gain clear insights on the U.S. economy, real estate, global markets, and more.”

So far, however, Hovde’s predictions about the U.S. economy have been less than accurate.

Hovde ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012. In a radio ad for his unsuccessful campaign, he asserted that a government default on the national debt was imminent and would likely lead to a global depression.

In a March 2012 interview on the “Vicki McKenna Show” in Madison, Wisconsin, he said the U.S. would face a debt crisis similar to one in Greece within the next three to four years. In another appearance on McKenna’s program, he warned the national debt would lead to anarchy in the streets within the next five years.

Hovde made an even more dire prediction in a July 2012 appearance on a show hosted by right-wing host Charlie Sykes, saying the U.S. would fall into recession within the next 12 months.

None of these predictions came to fruition.

Hovde’s alarmist predictions were not limited to his political campaign. In 2022, he told the Business Observer website in Florida that he believed the U.S. was on the brink of a global recession.

“I think we’re headed into a global recession, where there are really no bright spots,” Hovde said. “I think this recession is going to go longer and be more severe and last a minimum of 18 months, and probably more likely 24 to 36 months.”

In April, Hovde predicted recession again but this time said it would be partially caused by energy policy.

“Until we truly get to the heart of inflation and start changing some of our economic and energy policies, then we may enter a recession this year, and I think we will be stuck in this difficult slowdown for some time to come,” Hovde wrote in a Sunwest Bank newsletter.
Hovde has met with the National Republican Senatorial Committee about a possible 2024 run. He did not immediately respond to a request to comment for this story.

Reprinted with permission from American Journal News.

Republican Party of Wisconsin

Wisconsin GOP Senate Candidates All Support Abortion Ban

The Republican field for the 2024 Wisconsin Senate race remains in flux as several potential candidates mull over whether to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Despite strong support among Wisconsin voters for reproductive rights, each of the likely GOP contenders has a history of opposing legal abortion or actively working for an abortion ban.

In the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans expected a “red wave” would net them a pickup of at least two Democratic-held U.S. Senate seats and a GOP majority in the chamber. Instead, every single GOP challenger lost, and Democrats ended up gaining an open Republican-held seat in Pennsylvania.

Many analysts have attributed the lack of predicted Republican victories to voters’ anger over the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the nearly 50-year-old guarantee of reproductive rights established in Roe v. Wade. Republicans nominated abortion rights opponents in targeted Senate races across the country in 2022, and they all lost to Democratic backers of reproductive freedom.

As the 2024 elections approach, Senate Republicans seem poised to repeat the same failed approach.

On June 17, the WisPolitics political news site held a straw poll at the convention of the Republican Party of Wisconsin in La Crosse. Six possible Republican Senate candidates received support: former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke; real estate developer and 2012 Senate candidate Eric Hovde; staffing firm executive Scott Mayer; former College Democrats of America president turned 2018 GOP Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson; former state Senate President Roger Roth; and U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany.

Clarke has repeatedly backed state and federal abortion bans. After House Democrats passed a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons in July 2022, he tweeted: “Oh bag it Democrats. They claim gun control will save lives. SO WILL A BAN ON ABORTION. That kills more lives than guns do.”

A month earlier, Clarke compared abortion rights to slavery, tweeting: “These same devils would have called reversing Plessey v Ferguson [sic] and Dred Scott decision was a step backward. WRONG. It righted a wrong by the US Supreme Court just like reversing Roe v Wade has done. Killing babies is as immoral a wrong as slavery.”

According to the progressive website Blogging Blue, Hovde said at a July 2012 campaign event, “I’m 100% pro-life,” and added that he only would make an exception in cases of rape and incest. In campaign radio ads that year, he noted an endorsement from the anti-abortion rights group Wisconsin Right to Life and said: “I believe that we’re all created in God’s image. Defending innocent human life is a basic responsibility of civilized people.”

Wisconsin Right to Life said in its June 2012 endorsement, “Eric Hovde has indicated strong support for federal right-to-life issues should he be elected.”

“I am absolutely unapologetically pro-life, I really am,” Mayer told USA Today in May, “ but we have to have some access.” In April, he told NBC News that he was “absolutely pro-life” and would likely allow the procedure only in the first three months, except in cases of rape, incest, or health risk.

Though Nicholson said in a 2000 address at the Democratic National Convention that Democrats “care about a woman’s right to choose,” he has since abandoned his support for reproductive rights. During his unsuccessful 2018 bid for the Senate, he said he would back an abortion ban but would consider exceptions “case by case” as long as the legislation “saves the unborn and does it in a way that’s enforceable.” In an aborted 2022 gubernatorial campaign, Nicholson promised to “protect innocent life” by providing state funding for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.

During Roth’s unsuccessful 2022 campaign for lieutenant governor, his biography on his campaign website said, “Despite radical moves from liberals to push partial-birth abortion, abortion on demand, or murdering a child based on their sex, Roger has stood to thwart the left’s ruthless ambition to end the life of thousands of future Wisconsinites.”

Roth sponsored a 2015 bill in the Wisconsin Senate to prohibit “abortion of an unborn child considered capable of experiencing pain.” Abortion rights opponents have falsely claimed that fetuses can feel pain as early as 15 weeks into a pregnancy, though the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says on its website, “The science conclusively establishes that a human fetus does not have the capacity to experience pain until after at least 24–25 weeks.”

Tiffany received “A+” ratings from the anti-abortion rights group SBA Pro-Life America for the past two Congresses, indicating consistent agreement with its positions. He is currently a co-sponsor of a bill that would ban abortions nationally after a “fetal heartbeat is detectable.” Abortion opponents falsely claim that there is a heartbeat at six weeks into a pregnancy, while the science shows that there is no cardiac structure in a fetus at that age.

“All of the potential GOP candidates for Senate want to help Mitch McConnell and MAGA Republicans pass a national abortion ban and keep abortion illegal in Wisconsin,” Arik Wolk, a spokesperson for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told the American Independent Foundation. “That’s out of touch with Wisconsin values and dangerous for our state and our country.”

According to the report “Abortion Attitudes in a Post-Roe World: Findings From the 50-State 2022 American Values Atlas,” produced by the nonprofit research organization PRRI, 64 percent of Wisconsin residents believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases.

A June 2023 survey by the polling firm GQR of voters in Wisconsin and six other Senate battleground states, commissioned by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, found that 65 percent support abortion being legal in all or most circumstances.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

GOP Ads Falsely Claim Democratic Senators Will 'Take Away' Social Security (VIDEO)

GOP Ads Falsely Claim Democratic Senators Will 'Take Away' Social Security (VIDEO)

A couple of weeks after President Joe Biden noted in his State of the Union address that some congressional Republicans want to cut safety net programs, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is running false ads accusing Senate Democrats of wanting to put Medicare and Social Security "at risk."

The campaign arm of the Senate Republican conference released a series of six nearly identical attack ads on Tuesday, accusing potentially vulnerable Democratic incumbents up for reelection in 2022 of trying to take away retirement benefits from older Americans.

One 15-second spot targets Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

Over various stock video clips, a narrator tells viewers: "You earned your retirement benefits. Follow the rules. Paid into the system. But Tammy Baldwin wants to take 'em away. Baldwin backed Joe Biden's extreme agenda, putting your Medicare and Social Security at risk. Tell Tammy Baldwin: Hands off our benefits."

The words "TAMMY BALDWIN Take your benefits away" appear on the screen, sourced to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which describes itself as "a Washington, DC-based think tank that actively fosters bipartisanship by combining the best ideas from both parties to promote health, security, and opportunity for all Americans."

The claim that Baldwin backed Biden's "extreme agenda" is tied in very small letters to her 2021 vote for the American Rescue Plan, Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package. The accusation that her vote imperiled Social Security and Medicare is attributed to a February 2021 CNBC report about a provision in the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 that would trigger an automatic cut to Medicare — though not to Social Security — unless Congress specifically voted to stop it.

The group makes the same claims in its ads against Sens. Sherrod Brown (OH), Bob Casey (PA), Joe Manchin (WV), Jacky Rosen (NV), and Jon Tester (MT) with a script that's identical aside from the lawmakers' names.

An array of House and Senate Republicans recently backed significant cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson proposed making annual spending on the programs optional. Since Biden called them out in his February 7 State of the Union address to Congress, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Iowa Rep. Randy Feenstra, and other Republican lawmakers have falsely claimed it is really the Democrats who are trying to cut the programs.

In a February 17 press release, NRSC spokesperson Tate Mitchell said: "We are fully prepared to hold Tammy Baldwin accountable for backing policies that threatened Social Security and Medicare. Democrats' reckless spending is the true threat to these two popular programs."

An NRSC spokesperson did not immediately respond to an American Independent Foundation request for the source of the claim that each of the six Democrats want to cut Social Security or Medicare benefits.

The only related document on the Bipartisan Policy Committee's website from the date listed in the ads is a blog post endorsing changes to the Social Security program, warning that inflation was putting benefits at risk. It doesn't mention the six Senate Democrats.

The cited CNBC story noted that because the pandemic relief act increased the federal deficit, it would trigger a 4% cut to Medicare starting in 2022, as well as other cuts to mandatory programs, but would not impact Social Security. It also said that experts fully expected Congress to waive those required cuts — as it did after President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress enacted the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and following the enactment of bipartisan COVID-19 relief bills in 2020.

"That ain't gonna happen," former Congressional Budget Office official Barry Anderson told the outlet. "They'll waive it."

Indeed, in December 2021, 59 senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and nine other Republicans — voted to delay the Medicare cuts until 2023.

Last December, a bipartisan majority further delayed the automatic cuts until at least 2025 as part of its Consolidated Appropriations Act. That legislation passed 68-29 with 18 Senate Republicans in support.

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines voted against both bills, as did most members of his caucus.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.