Eric Hovde concedes the 2024 Wisconsin Senate race on social media Monday. (Screenshot | Hovde campaign X account)
Republican candidate Eric Hovde conceded Monday in the U.S. Senate race after losing to incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin, forgoing a recount while continuing to criticize the longstanding practice in which absentee ballots in Milwaukee were counted in the early morning hours after Election Day.
Hovde posted his concession speech in a video on social media.
Hovde conceded a few hours before the Wisconsin Elections Commission reported Monday that all 72 counties in Wisconsin had completed their election canvass, triggering a three-day window for Hovde to seek a recount in the race.
A developer and the owner of a West Coast bank, Hovde had declined to concede in the immediate aftermath of The Associated Press calling the race for Baldwin in the early morning hours of Wednesday, Nov. 6.
A week later, he posted a video in which he said he would await the completion of the canvass process while airing complaints about the vote count. His criticisms focused largely on the fact that about 108,000 absentee ballots that were not counted in Milwaukee until the early morning after Election Day changed the outcome of the election total.
Hovde’s remarks drew widespread criticism, with the Milwaukee Election Commission refuting implications of impropriety. Milwaukee’s absentee ballots are consolidated and delivered to the city’s central counting facility to be tabulated, and a bill to allow them to be processed starting the day before the election died after GOP leaders in the state Senate declined to put it on the calendar.
Republican analysts also said, both on Election Day and the next week, that the city’s late-night tabulation of the absentee ballots was standard practice and that its history of having a heavy tilt toward Democrats was predictable.
Nevertheless, Hovde reiterated his complaint Monday in the course of his concession speech.
“The results from election night were disappointing, particularly in light of the last-minute absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m., flipping the outcome,” he said. “There are many troubling issues around these absentee ballots and their timing, which I addressed in my last statement.”
Hovde said supporters had urged him “to challenge the election results,” but that “without a detailed review of all the ballots and their legitimacy, which will be difficult to obtain in the courts, a request for a recount would serve no purpose because you will just be recounting the same ballots regardless of their integrity.”
Hovde said he had decided instead to concede out of “my desire to not add to political strife through a contentious recount.”
Hovde also criticized Democrats’ support of two third-party candidates, one running on a platform of supporting Donald Trump and the other as a Libertarian, contending that without them he would have won the race.
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