This GOP Senate Hopeful Is Railing Against Electric Vehicles. He Made Big Money Off EV Stocks.

On the campaign trail, Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Eric Hovde has repeatedly attacked electric vehicle subsidies, describing them as part of a broader green energy “tax scheme” and “corporate welfare.”

Yet when it came to investing his own vast wealth, Hovde has bet on EV manufacturers like Rivian, Lucid Motors and Nikola Corp . In the last year alone, he raked in as much as $5.26 million in capital gains from investments in EVs, including in companies that have received massive government subsidies and tax breaks, according to financial disclosures reviewed by HuffPost.

Hovde, a multimillionaire bank executive who ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2012, is challenging incumbent Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin. He is carrying out a run-of-the-mill MAGA campaign that has included grumbling about electric vehicles and the Biden administration’s green energy agenda.

In radio and podcast interviews since announcing his campaign in February, Hovde has condemned EV and green energy initiatives as “just corporate welfare for a lot of people making a ton of money off of it.” He’s dismissed so-called EV “mandates” as products of a “liberal fantasy land” that will “be a bloodbath for the automaker.”

In an April interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Hovde painted EVs and wind turbines as not economically viable, and called tax credits to support these technologies “tax games” and “tax schemes.”

Shortly before his official campaign announcement, Hovde told the Vicki McKenna Show that “EVs aren’t even that environmentally friendly” and railed against their reducedefficiency in cold weather.

“It’s all a charade,” he said of EVs. “They’re great at gaslighting.”

EVs have become a favorite target of the GOP. But