MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The wife of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde has taken center stage in her husband’s campaign in the days after he secured the party’s nomination, directly attacking Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin in a television ad released Thursday about single mothers.
The race between Baldwin, a two-term incumbent senator, and millionaire businessman Hovde is one of the most closely watched races this cycle. A Baldwin victory in the battleground state of Wisconsin is seen as crucial for Democrats to have a shot at retaining majority control of the Senate.
Hovde’s campaign took a personal turn this week, starting with two ads prominently featuring his wife Sharon Hovde, discussing Hovde’s charity work and his battle with multiple sclerosis.
Sharon Hovde also speaks directly to the camera in the latest campaign spot released Thursday. It’s a response to a Baldwin ad that attacked Hovde for comments he made about single mothers during his previous Senate campaign in 2012.
That year, Hovde said in an interview that being a single mother is “a direct path to a life of poverty” that also “leads to higher drug rates, it leads to more mental and physical health problems. And unfortunately for our young men, higher incarceration rates in prison.”
In another 2012 interview, Hovde said that having children outside of marriage leads to “higher poverty rates, higher incarceration rates for those young children, higher dropout rates, higher depression rates. It’s devastating for them.”
Baldwin placed an ad earlier this month in which children of single parents criticized Hovde for his comments.
“What’s wrong with this guy?” a man says in the ad. Baldwin does not appear in the ad, which was paid for by her campaign.
In Hovde’s response ad, his wife doesn’t dispute his comments. Instead, she focuses her attention on Baldwin.
“Senator Baldwin, your dirty campaign has gone too far,” Sharon Hovde says in the ad. “Your latest attack on my husband is about single mothers? I was a single mother when I met Eric. It was hard. Eric saw the struggles I had trying to pay for child care.”
Sharon Hovde was separated from her first husband when she and Eric Hovde met, Hovde’s campaign spokesman Ben Voelkel said. Sharon Hovde’s daughter was 3 at the time. Hovde and his wife also have a daughter together.
Baldwin’s campaign defended its attack ad on Hovde.
“Eric Hovde’s words speak for themselves,” Baldwin spokesman Andrew Mamo said. “He insulted the children of single mothers, just as he insulted Wisconsin’s seniors, farmers and people struggling with their weight. Wisconsinites deserve a senator who respects them, not one who demeans them.”
It’s rare for a candidate’s spouse to play such a prominent role in news coverage, beyond simply being a surrogate, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. But when they are used, it’s often in a way to attack a weakness or criticism of the candidate, Dittmar said.
Male candidates running against women often use the women in their lives to launch attacks on their female opponents, Dittmar said.
“If they can have those attacks done by another woman, and not directly by a man, they can avoid some of the criticism that a man is attacking a woman,” she said.
