Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.) has raised over $1 million from California donors while attacking her Republican opponent for having West Coast ties.
Baldwin has raised $1.4 million from Golden State benefactors in the 2024 cycle, according to campaign finance records. That’s nearly 10 times as much as her Republican challenger Eric Hovde—a businessman whom Baldwin has slammed as a “California bank owner”—has taken from California donors.
The Democratic Party of Wisconsin has taken aim at Hovde for owning a mansion in Laguna Beach and holding a leadership role at the California-based Sunwest Bank. The pro-Baldwin Capital Times, a left-leaning newspaper in Madison, described Hovde’s campaign as “awash in California cash” and reported that he has “collected $60,000 from campaign donors with California ties.”
But campaign finance records show Hovde has raised around $100,000 from California donors, a number dwarfed by Baldwin’s $1.4 million haul.
Baldwin makes frequent fundraising trips to Los Angeles and San Francisco, where she often hobnobs with anti-Israel and anti-police activists. Since her first campaign for Congress in 1998, Baldwin has spent over $60,000 on fundraising trips in California, according to campaign finance records.
Her travel has paid off. The Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas are two of her largest funding sources, with donors from those cities alone pouring $3.9 million into her campaigns since she joined Congress, according to data published by OpenSecrets.
Some of her fundraisers have been co-hosted by activists with a history of extreme political positions.
Earlier this month, Baldwin gave the keynote speech at a benefit luncheon for the Democratic Women of Santa Barbara County. One of the event’s co-sponsors was Assemblyman Gregg Hart, who lobbied for an extension of California’s controversial “zero bail” policy, an initiative that eliminated cash bail for most criminal offenses in the state.
In July, Baldwin was photographed at a San Francisco fundraiser with anti-Israel activist Nadia Rahman. Rahman has accused Israel of “war crimes & apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing,” Jewish Insider reported last year.
Last June, Baldwin attended a Bay Area fundraiser co-hosted by local activist Carolyn Wysinger, who has called “racist police violence” a “public health emergency,” Fox News reported.
“Folks that know that racist police violence is an issue, but can’t do the one thing it takes to break the system, the one thing it takes to break the stranglehold of white supremacy on society, the one thing it takes to stop anti-Blackness from being taught worldwide: Stop centering whiteness,” wrote Wysinger in a 2020 newspaper column.
