For all of the excitement that national races in Wisconsin have brought over the last decade, it is with some disappointment we report that the 2024 Senate race in the Badger State is a relatively tepid affair. 

In the wake of Trump’s victory in Wisconsin back in 2016, incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin came through two years later with a vengeance, overperforming the state’s partisan lean substantially to achieve a second term. Her 10.8% margin ended up being the largest margin of statewide victory since 2008, a record that remained elusive until just last year, when the more liberal candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court triumphed by 11% in a high profile race. With Democratic wins up and down the ballot in Wisconsin over the last six years – narrowly electing Tony Evers as in 2018, a narrow vote for Joe Biden in 2020, and a slightly wider reelection margin for Evers two years ago – Baldwin should be in a pretty good position to win her third term, right?

She is, but not because of all that. Let’s start with the candidate herself: Baldwin is an unabashed progressive, she was the first openly LGBT woman elected to the Senate (and, before that, the House, where she served for 14 years), is routinely ranked among the most liberal members of the chamber. I bring this up because Wisconsin is perhaps the most important swing state of the 2010s and this runs counter to the moderate approach you’d expect an incumbent to embrace in a competitive, increasingly Republican-leaning state.

Wisconsin has very clearly trended rightward over the last ten years and it has become harder and harder for Democrats to claw their way to victory. When they’ve prevailed, it generally came by running relatively innocuous candidates (such as Evers) against Republican candidates of dubious quality who were already unpopular. Meanwhile, they’ve failed to knock off Republicans such as the state’s other senator, Ron Johnson, a particularly ornery Republican closely tied to Trump and who has dabbled in election denialism, January 6 conspiracies, racist rhetoric, and vaccine misinformation. Johnson’s not on the ballot this year, but Democrats’ failure to unseat him is instructive, as Wisconsin’s proclivity for both progressivism and fringe conservatism defies an easy narrative (other than those which reference the state’s fondness for a cold one with the boys).

This cycle, Baldwin is challenged by Republican Eric Hovde, a banker who has dabbled in Wisconsin politics (to no avail) before. He’s been accused of carpetbagging, a charge accentuated by the fact that he appeared in a list of Orange County’s most most influential residents as recently as 2018; he responded to these charges by hopping into a freezing lake, suggesting Baldwin do the same to see “who’s really from Wisconsin.” Baldwin (who was born in the state and has represented it at various levels for more than 30 years) has seized on Hovde’s financial services background and ability to self-finance his campaign to cast him as out of touch with the good people of Wisconsin.

Hovde has some other baggage (for example, he claimed special competence in dealing with senior issues because his bank lent money to an elder care facility. That facility was sued for abuse and wrongful death. Hovde has also said that “almost nobody in a nursing home” is competent to cast a vote),but there’s a stark contrast between him and some of the rest of the Republican field nationally. As Republicans embark on yet another Senate cycle where their odds of victory are diminished by the quality of their candidates, Hovde is something of a relative normie. Sure, he was once “totally opposed to abortion” (he now says the issue should be decided by the voters and supports some exceptions), and he also suggested that the outcomes for children born out of wedlock are worse (even if that may be true, there’s less weird ways to say it!). But now, his wife is out on the trail too, hitting back as Baldwin attempts to cast Hovde as more extreme than his 2024 campaign suggests. If anything, Hovde has moderated his rhetoric on the issues Republicans are particularly vulnerable on like abortion and relitigating the 2020 election.

It’s nearly an ideal situation for a Republican Senate candidate in a very purple state – they have the opportunity to run a candidate who is at least trying to be more moderate and not constantly playing defense on the issues against the “progressive” Baldwin. So why has Hovde failed to lead in any poll?
There are some compelling explanations (all of which probably matter to a certain degree): Baldwin’s incumbency and name recognition gives her a leg up; the not-so-subtle direction of federal money going to the battleground state over the course of the Biden administration, a little outbound migration of Republicans to states like Florida or Texas; a leftward shift in the Milwaukee suburb counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington (“WOW”). But I’ll leave you with an unconventional one: at the frontlines of American politics, the Badger State is beholden to brinkmanship and partisan rancor. Almost like it’s stuck in Stockholm syndrome to our greater national division, Wisconsin has taken it most to heart and rewards both the far-right and the progressive movements: it rages against the elites but, unfortunately, remains incredibly segregated; it can elect vaccine skeptics and election deniers while its citizens beat the drum against abortion restrictions. Put in other words, passion and vision matter, and that means partisanship matters. While the “boring” Evers narrowly prevailed in two close elections, Baldwin overperformed him substantially back in 2018. Were Baldwin running in Florida, Georgia, or North Carolina, she might be in more trouble, but she sees something that many (like Hillary Clinton in 2016) don’t: by embracing the contest and the rancor, and giving the people of Wisconsin a race, partisanship can be a powerful motivator to her advantage.