Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 71. Sunrise is 6:10 and sunset 7:38 for 13h 27m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1861, Wisconsin Governor Alexander W. Randall received a telegram from Washington requesting one regiment of 780 men to serve the Union for three months in the Civil War. Within a week, ten companies from Kenosha, Beloit, Horican, Fond du Lac, Madison, and Milwaukee were ready.
The fall election in Wisconsin is expected to be competitive for presidential and U.S. Senate candidates. Perhaps it will be. A competitive United States Senate race, however, requires two capable candidates, not one capable candidate and a vanity candidate who sounds like he fell from a turnip truck yesterday. Nikki McCann Ramirez reports Trump-Endorsed Senate Candidate Questions if Nursing Home Residents Are Alive Enough to Vote (“If you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six-month life expectancy,” Eric Hovde said in an interview earlier this month):
During an April 5 interview on The Guy Benson Show, Hovde, a Republican running to unseat Democratic Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, claimed that it was suspicious that some nursing homes in Wisconsin had “100-percent voting” percentages. “Well, if you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six-month life expectancy. Almost nobody in a nursing home is in a point to vote and you had children, adult children showing up saying, ‘Who voted for my 85 or 90-year-old father or mother?'” Hovde told Benson.
Hovde, whose comments were first reported by Heartland Signal, is not entirely correct in his assessment of nursing home life expectancy. While it’s true that some residents die within months of entering assisted living, many live comfortably for years in long-term residential care, while others voluntarily leave nursing homes for a multitude of reasons, including a preference for in-home care.
Regardless of how long a person stays in a nursing home, the right to vote has no age-based expiration date. Wisconsin became a focal point for election conspiracies in the aftermath of the 2020 election, including through largely baseless claims that nursing home employees had fabricated or manipulated the votes of elderly patients.
Hovde, a banker and investor by trade, made an unsuccessful bid for the Senate in 2012, and announced his second attempt to win a seat in the higher chamber in February.
Hovde is trying to explain (presumably) that some nursing home ballots are coerced, but he’s green and awkward in mixing that narrow message with a message about life expectancy. An experienced incumbent in a competitive race would not have made a mistake like Hovde’s.
Like Tim Michels before him, Hovde’s a vanity candidate, the choice of established men who assume that other established men must, as though a law of nature, be right for whatever they attempt.
It’s quite the assumption.
See also Tim Michels 2.0 Eric Hovde Announces U.S. Senate Run and Eric Hovde Should Fire His Political Consultants and Hire a Therapist.
The Hop streetcar arrives at Milwaukee’s lakefront with a new route and stop: