Eric Hovde, the Republican banking executive challenging Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, could develop a problem with older voters.
The Utah-based bank he runs, Sunwest, was named last month as a co-defendant in a California lawsuit accusing a senior living facility partially owned by the bank of elder abuse, negligence and intentional homicide.
Mr. Hovde’s campaign called the lawsuit baseless and said it was a travesty to hold a bank’s chief executive and CEO responsible for the actions of a company that seized it in a foreclosure in 2021. Whatever its merits, the lawsuit is likely to have been largely irrelevant. Wouldn’t Mr. Hovde himself have recently boasted in his political campaign that he had acquired expertise in the nursing home industry as a lender for such residences?
In comments this month suggesting that there were irregularities in the 2020 election, Mr. Hovde drew on that experience, saying that nursing home residents have “a life expectancy of five, six months” and that ” almost no one in one. “The nursing home is at a point where a vote must be taken.” Those comments were quickly condemned by Democrats in Wisconsin and by former Milwaukee Bucks star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The latest cluster of problems is an inauspicious start to a campaign that Republicans hope will help wrest control of the Senate from Democrats. Mr. Hovde is one of four wealthy Republicans running to unseat Democratic incumbents in Ohio, Montana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Each of these states is either heavily Republican or is considered a flop in the upcoming presidential race, and losing any of these seats could cost Democrats control of the Senate. The large financial resources of candidates like Mr. Hovde will ease the GOP’s heavy fundraising burden as the party faces Democrats’ early financial advantage.
But Mr. Hovde’s stumbling blocks point to a difficulty with this self-financing strategy: With business assets and business experience come business problems.
The wrongful death lawsuit is a case in point.
In 2021, Sunwest Bank seized the property of a 68-bed assisted living facility in Claremont, California, after its owners failed to repay a $6 million loan. The next year, Betty Nottoli, a 94-year-old woman with dementia, moved into the renamed Claremont Hacienda, then partially owned by a newly formed subsidiary of Sunwest.
According to a lawsuit filed by her daughter Patricia Chiuppi, Ms. Nottoli suffered a series of falls that Ms. Chiuppi said were due to neglect. Court documents say facility staff failed to install pull cords, tags, bed rails or a bed alarm, even after a fall in March. Then, on the night of April 4, 2022, Ms. Nottoli broke her hip in another fall, “ultimately leading to her death on June 19, 2022,” court documents say.
Ben Voelkel, a spokesman for the Hovde campaign, said in a statement that there was “no basis for this claim.” He added: “The lawsuit does not address the circumstances of the incident. It admits that they are unknown.”
Lisa Flint, the lawyer representing Ms. Chiuppi, declined to comment in detail, saying the investigation into the lawsuit has just begun and the trial date is set for March 25, 2025.
“The facility’s documentation showed bruises, injuries to her arms and head, but there was no real investigation into her falls,” Ms. Flint said.
Originally, the lawsuit only named Claremont Hacienda and its parent companies, but on March 25, Ms. Flint amended the lawsuit to name one of the placeholder defendants: Mr. Hovde’s Sunwest Bank, legally identified as one of the “owners, officials, administrators, managers.” and/or members” of the geriatric care facility.
A Sunwest attorney, Robert S. McWhorter, said the bank had not yet responded to the lawsuit because Ms. Flint had not yet served it with the papers. He said the lawsuit was frivolous, that Sunwest should not have been named and that the complaint did not allege Sunwest’s direct involvement.
Mr. Voelkel said in a statement: “Sunwest Bank was a member of an LLC that came into possession of the facility through a foreclosure. A third party unrelated to Sunwest and the LLC managed the facility. The lawsuit is without merit, which may be why the filing attorney did not actually serve Sunwest and stopped communicating with the bank.”
He also accused Ms. Flint of being a “Democratic donor” based on a single $5 donation in 2020 to ActBlue, which pools political donations to Democratic candidates.
With the trial set to begin four months after the 2024 election, an elder abuse and wrongful death lawsuit in Southern California might have seemed distant to Wisconsin voters.
But Mr. Hovde himself has drawn attention to his work in the nursing home world. When Mr. Hovde was pressed by a Milwaukee television news anchor this month about his claims of “problems” in the 2020 election, he responded, “Look, I’m lending to the nursing home community, or I used to.” And it’s true: Sunwest has generated millions of dollars in revenue from its assisted living properties, including Claremont Hacienda.
Mr. Hovde continued to make allegations of voter fraud and appeared to suggest that residents were unable to vote: “The average life expectancy in a nursing home is four to five months. How can the sheriff of Racine County find 100 percent of the voters and, for that matter, children of parents, elderly parents who are dying, and say, ‘Who voted for my parents?’ Who was that?'”
Days later, Mr. Hovde made a similar point on Guy Benson’s political talk show. “If you’re in a nursing home, you only have a life expectancy of five, six months,” he said. “Almost no one in a nursing home is willing to vote, and there were children, adult children, who showed up and said, ‘Who voted for my 85- or 90-year-old father or my 85- or 90-year-old mother?'”
Mr. Hovde was referring to a real dispute surrounding the 2020 election in Wisconsin. In 2021, the Racine County Sheriff’s Office accused the state election commission of improperly blocking people assisting with absentee voting from entering nursing homes to assist elderly voters. The commission had ruled that such “special proxies” posed too great a health risk during the Covid-19 pandemic, given the toll the disease had already taken on assisted living facilities.
The dispute continues. County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling, a Republican, said nearly a year after the 2020 election that his office received a complaint from a woman whose mother was classified as a voter even though she had died before Election Day. The sheriff’s office said voter turnout was higher than usual in 2020 and that some nursing home residents who voted had not voted since 2016 or 2012.
But overall voter turnout in Wisconsin was extremely high in 2020, at 72.3 percent, and audits of the election found no widespread fraud, in nursing homes or elsewhere.
Mr. Hovde’s statement that “almost no one in a nursing home is able to vote” has attracted widespread attention. In Wisconsin, people age 65 or older make up 18 percent of the state’s population – making them a significant voting bloc, especially since they have a high propensity to vote.
In recent days, Mr. Hovde has sought to clarify his comments. This week he reiterated his belief that “a large percentage” of nursing home residents “lack the mental capacity” to vote. But he added in an interview on Wisconsin radio: “I think older people should definitely vote.”
That may not be the end of the matter – especially since Mr. Abdul-Jabbar, who is known throughout much of the country as a big star for the Los Angeles Lakers but is remembered by Wisconsin residents of a certain age as a star for the Milwaukee Bucks, is speaking out reported.
“What is concerning here is his desire to strip people who have given a lifetime of giving to this country of their rights based on one physical characteristic: age,” Mr. Abdul-Jabbar wrote on his Substack account. He added: “Even if there was fraud, the aim should be to expose it, not to deny choice to all people in care homes.”
On April 12, the Wisconsin Democratic Party organized a protest against Mr. Hovde in Milwaukee with a small group of older voters, elderly care workers and nursing home workers. On a windy, chilly day, assisted living home residents took turns at a Plexiglas lectern, denouncing the Republican and pledging to vote against him.
“It is clear that California bank owner Eric Hovde does not care about seniors or their families,” said Arik Wolk, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Democratic Party.
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2024-04-20 13:30:05
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