Hovde a Loser Twice Over

Eric Hovde is giving us a little, inconsequential, second rate taste of what we would have gotten had Donald Trump lost the election.

Trump made it clear that he would only accept the results of the election if he won. Had he lost, we’d now be mired in baseless allegations of voter fraud and a flurry of court challenges. Republicans who won their own elections on the very same ballot would be echoing Trump… but never raising the obvious questions then about their own elections. And, of course, when all that failed, Trump would try to push phony slates of state electors and get his supporters in Congress to vote against certification. Along the way, he would have vilified election officials and even front line election workers.

We’re avoiding most of that because Trump won and because the Democrats are still tethered to reality and still respect our democracy. We got the latest example of that just yesterday when Joe Biden graciously welcomed Trump back to the White House and set about cooperating in a smooth transition. Trump never did that, sowing chaos during his own transition out of office in 2020, culminating in the January 6th violent insurrection.

But there’s no similar display of Biden’s class from Hovde. He has still not conceded a race he clearly lost. Worse, he’s raised the specter of voting irregularities in a video aimed at his supporters. It’s pathetic in a way. He’s following a playbook that Trump and the rest of his party have now tossed because it didn’t turn out that they needed it. He’s out there pretty much by himself, screaming, “But wait, you guys, aren’t we all following the plan?! What about me?! Guys? Guys?”

In his video, Hovde makes three specific allegations.

He bemoans absentee vote totals reported by Milwaukee at four in the morning the day after the election. But that was expected and it was expected because legislative Republicans refused to change the law to allow Milwaukee and other places to start counting early ballots the day before the election. They did that precisely so that Trump could claim fraud had he lost. Turns out they didn’t do it for Hovde.

Along these lines, Hovde says that 90% of those votes were for Baldwin, when she only got about 80% on election day. Again, that’s not surprising since more Democrats vote early.

Then he points out, darkly, that vote totals in some places exceeded the number of registered voters. Again, not unusual as same day registrants aren’t counted in the original voter rolls. Hovde also failed to point out that some places that reported more than 100% turnout voted for him.

Hovde’s not a dumb guy. He knows better. But rather than graciously concede, as Kamala Harris has done, he’s going out by tossing more grenades into the wheels of our perfectly sound elections system.

Hovde’s a loser — in every sense of the word.