Eric Hovde, the Utah-based Sunwest executive who is challenging Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, may be developing a problem with older voters.

Eric Hovde, the Republican bank executive challenging Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, may be developing a problem with older voters.

The bank he heads, Utah-based Sunwest, was named last month as a co-defendant in a California lawsuit accusing a senior living facility partly owned by the bank of elder abuse, negligence and wrongful death.

Hovde’s campaign called the lawsuit baseless and said it was farcical to hold a bank’s chairman and CEO responsible for the actions of a company seized in bankruptcy in 2021. Whatever its merits, the lawsuit may have been largely irrelevant to Hovde’s political views. campaign, had he not recently boasted that he had acquired expertise in the nursing home sector as a lender for such homes.

In comments this month suggesting there had been irregularities in the 2020 election, Hovde drew on that experience, saying that nursing home residents “have a life expectancy of five to six months” and that “almost no one is in a nursing home about to vote.” Those comments were quickly condemned by Wisconsin Democrats and former Milwaukee Bucks star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The recent pile-up of problems is an inauspicious start to a campaign that Republicans hope will help wrest control of the Senate from Democrats. Hovde is one of four wealthy Republicans running to dethrone Democratic incumbents in Ohio, Montana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Each of these states is leaning heavily toward Republicans in the upcoming presidential election, or is considered a toss-up, and losing any of those seats could cost Democrats control of the Senate. The deep pockets of candidates like Hovde will ease the Republican Party’s heavy fundraising burdens as the party faces the Democrats’ early financial advantage.

But Hovde’s stumbles point to a problem with that self-financing strategy: With business wealth and business experience come business problems.

The wrongful death lawsuit is an example of this.

In 2021, Sunwest Bank seized ownership of a 68-bed assisted living facility in Claremont, California, after the owners failed to repay a $6 million loan. The following year, Betty Nottoli, a 94-year-old woman with dementia, moved into the renamed Claremont Hacienda, which was then part-owned by a newly formed Sunwest subsidiary.

According to a lawsuit filed by her daughter, Patricia Chiuppi, Nottoli suffered a number of falls that Chiuppi says were caused by neglect. Court documents allege that even after a March fall, staff at the facility failed to install pull cords, hangers, bed rails or a bed alarm. Then, on the night of April 4, 2022, another fall broke Nottoli’s hip, “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 fails to identify the circumstances surrounding the incident. It admits that they are unknown.”

Lisa Flint, the attorney representing Chiuppi, declined to comment at length, saying discovery in the lawsuit had only just begun, with a trial date set for March 25, 2025.

“The facility’s documentation showed bruises, injuries to arms and head, but there was no real investigation into her falls,” Flint said.

Initially, only Claremont Hacienda and its parent companies were named in the lawsuit, but on March 25, Flint amended the complaint to name one of the temporary defendants: Hovde’s Sunwest Bank, legally identified as one of the “owners, officers, trustees, managers and/ or members” of the elderly care institution.

An attorney for Sunwest, Robert S. McWhorter, said the bank had not yet responded to the lawsuit because Flint had not yet filed the paperwork. He said the lawsuit was frivolous, that Sunwest should not have been named and that the complaint does not allege any direct involvement by Sunwest.

Voelkel said in a statement: “Sunwest Bank was a member of an LLC that took ownership of the facility through a foreclosure. A third party unrelated to Sunwest and the LLC managed the facility. The lawsuit is meritless, which may be why the filing attorney has not actually served Sunwest and is no longer communicating with the bank.”

He also accused Flint of being a “Democratic donor,” based on a single $5 donation in 2020 to ActBlue, which consolidates 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 may have seemed far away to Wisconsin voters.

But Hovde himself has drawn attention to his work in the nursing home world. Pressed by a Milwaukee television news anchor this month about his claims of “problems” in the 2020 election, Hovde responded, “Look, I lend money to the nursing home community, or I used to.” And it’s true: Sunwest has claimed millions of dollars in revenue from its assisted living projects, including Claremont Hacienda.

Hovde then cited allegations of voter fraud, which seemed to suggest that residents were unable to vote: “The average life expectancy in a nursing home is four to five months. How do you get the sheriff of Racine County to tell 100% of the people voting, and by the way, children of parents, elderly parents who are dying, ‘Who voted for my parent? Who did that?'”

Days later, Hovde made a similar point on Guy Benson’s political talk show. “If you stay in a nursing home, you only have a life expectancy of five to six months,” he said. “Almost no one in a nursing home is about to vote, and kids, adult kids, showed up and said, ‘Who voted for my 85- or 90-year-old mom or dad?’”

Overall voter turnout in Wisconsin was sky-high in 2020, at 72.3%, and audits of the elections found no widespread fraud, in nursing homes or elsewhere.

Hovde’s suggestion that “almost no one in a nursing home is about to vote” has attracted a lot of attention. In Wisconsin, people age 65 or older make up 18% of the state’s population—and therefore a significant voting bloc, especially because they have a high propensity to vote.

In recent days, Hovde has tried to clarify his comments. This past week, he reiterated his belief that “a large percentage” of nursing home residents “do not have the mental capacity to” vote. But he added in a Wisconsin radio interview: “I think older people should absolutely vote.”

That might not settle the matter — especially since Abdul-Jabbar, known in much of the country as a Los Angeles Lakers great but remembered by Wisconsinites of a certain age as a Bucks star, is gave an opinion.

“What is disturbing here is his desire to take away the rights of people who have spent a lifetime contributing to this country based on one physical characteristic: age,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote on his Substack account. He added: “Even if there is fraud, the goal should be to expose it, not deny voice to everyone in nursing homes.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.