Dem U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin early this morning declared victory after Milwaukee’s final tally of its absentee ballots pushed her to a nearly 16,000-vote lead over GOP businessman Eric Hovde.

Baldwin’s campaign said it expected that margin to grow as communities such as Oshkosh and Racine reported their final results.

With 97% of precincts reporting, Baldwin had 49.2% of the vote, compared to Hovde’s 48.7%. That was a margin of just less than 16,000 votes.

If Baldwin’s margin holds up, she will be the first Wisconsin candidate for U.S. Senate since 1968 to win an election when the nominee for the other party won the presidential race. Dem Gaylord Nelson that year won reelection even as Republican Richard Nixon took Wisconsin’s electoral votes in a landslide national election.

Along with longtime Libertarian activist Phil Anderson, who ran under the Disrupt the Corruption banner, Phil Leager of the America First Party, was on the ballot. Dems helped Leager qualify for the Wisconsin ballot, and he had about 28,000 votes in unofficial returns, while Anderson had more than 41,000.

Before Milwaukee and other central county communities released their results, Hovde told supporters at his election night party to go home because “We need a little more time to work through this process.”

“It’s unfortunate. If the Democrats wouldn’t have put a plant, this probably would’ve been called some time ago. But you know what? It is what it is,” Hovde said.

Baldwin, Hovde and the groups backing them spent more than $240 million on ads alone since Jan. 1. That surpassed the previous Wisconsin record for all spending that Open Secrets had tracked of nearly $225 million in the 2022.

Baldwin and her backers had an advantage of about $18 million in ad spending for the full race. But Hovde’s side had a significant spending advantage from late September on as the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund jumped into the Wisconsin race.

That group, Hovde and others hammered Baldwin on transgender issues, being in Washington for 25 years and allegations that she had a conflict of interest because she hasn’t disclosed the business interests of Maria Brisbane, a New York financial adviser. The two aren’t married, but they co-own a Washington, D.C.-condo.

Meanwhile, Baldwin and her backers relentlessly hit Hovde over abortion, his past comments and his ownership of a California bank.

The final Marquette University Law School Poll of the race found Baldwin’s favorable-unfavorable rating slipped underwater for the first time since January at 45-50. At the same time, Hovde began the race upside down and remained there, finishing at 36-48 in that final poll.

Heading into Election Day, the Real Clear Politics poling average was plus-1.8 percentage points in Baldwin’s favor.