ANNAPOLIS — Walking into Maryland’s State House is stepping out of time. The brick Georgian-style building, trimmed with marble and topped with a wooden dome, is the oldest continuously operating legislative building in the nation.
The tiny elevator you ride up to the second floor seems like it’s probably the oldest elevator in Maryland. The window panes are all wavy and distorted in the way 18th century glass always is.
The governor’s office is even more out of time when the Washington Examiner visits in January: The walls are totally bare and the room devoid of decor because Republican Larry Hogan has had to pack up his stuff in preparation for his successor, Democrat Wes Moore.
And in our exit interview, which covers crime, foreign policy, abortion, and the governor’s presidential ambitions, you would be forgiven at times for believing Hogan is running for the 1988 Republican nomination.
Hogan mentions Ronald Reagan 10 times in half an hour. He describes his fight against crime in Baltimore as “peace through strength” and brings up his speeches at the Reagan Library (2022) and the Ronald Reagan Institute (2020).
“I was a big Reagan guy,” Hogan says. “I was chairman of Youth for Reagan.” He begins to say that “Reagan is the guy” who got him involved in politics before catching himself to note his father, the late Rep. Lawrence Hogan (R-MD), also drew young Larry into politics. He used to have Reagan pictures all over his walls, he says.
Hogan even cast a write-in vote for Ronald Reagan in 2020 instead of supporting his own party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump. (Hogan wrote in his father in 2016, months before the elder Hogan died.)
What does Reagan, whose first election is as distant from Alf Landon’s presidential candidacy as it is from today, have to do with the 2024 election?
For one thing, you have to go back to Reagan to find a Republican who actually won, governed competently, and enjoyed lasting popularity.
Looking back over eight years in Maryland, you could say the same about Larry Hogan, a two-term governor of a deep-blue state. Hogan says his tenure provides the lessons “the Republican Party should learn … if we want to win elections, if you want to get back to building a bigger tent, like Reagan did.”
Hogan maintains he’s the man for that job.
A centrist? Or ‘Trump before Trump’?
Hogan wants to run for president and restore the GOP to something better than what it’s become in the Trump era.
While he seems like a long shot, given his refusal to back Trump as well as his low name ID, his ambitions have been clear since November 2020 when Hogan gave his “A Time For Choosing” speech at the Reagan Institute, in the days after Trump’s defeat. “There’s going to be a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” Hogan says, and it’s in that context that he is planning to launch a run for the White House.
He says it’s obvious that the GOP needs to move beyond Trump in order to win again and that it’s happening already. Trump trails in polls behind Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who hasn’t even announced. He is, Hogan says, “the only candidate filed for president, but he’s losing.”
At some point last year, he confirmed to the Washington Examiner, Hogan quietly began fielding focus groups full of likely Republican primary around the country. Would Republican voters consider nominating a candidate who had refused to vote for Trump, even in the general election? What if the candidate had criticized Trump repeatedly? Does it matter that the candidate agreed with Trump on most immigration policy, on taxes, and on getting tough on crime? How impressive is it that he won the Hispanic vote statewide and got 30% of the black vote?
“Even people that strongly supported Donald Trump and his policies are looking to go in a different direction. They’re willing to vote for somebody that was not supportive of Trump. And they care about issues, and they care about people that actually get things done.”
Hogan argues that his first victory in Maryland previewed Trump’s expansion of the GOP base to include working-class white people.
“Trump tapped into a frustration that I tapped into in 2014,” Hogan says. He did very well among union households and in blue-collar precincts.
“I tapped into frustrated, hardworking folks that thought that Maryland was out of control. It was all liberal Democrats that … had taxed people to death.” He draws parallels between himself in 2014 and Trump two years later: “I was the outsider, you know, business guy, real estate guy, never held elective office, who was mad as hell. I was going to upset the apple cart.”
Then Hogan makes the distinction: “But I did it in a nicer way. I tapped into that populist frustration, but I did it without the name-calling and the angry tweets.”
The other contrast Hogan draws between himself and Trump: Hogan gets a majority of the popular vote in his elections and has high approval ratings.
“Trump kept talking about, ‘We’re gonna win so much we get tired of winning,’ but all we’ve done is lose.” Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, and since then, the GOP lost both chambers, lost the White House, barely won back the House in a midterm, and lost many governorships and state legislatures.
“It’s not that I disagree with Trump’s policies. I just don’t like losing elections because then the Left gets to govern.”
Blunt force
For a guy who considers himself a “nicer” populist and who is typically called “moderate” and “bipartisan,” Hogan has no trouble attacking Democrats. “I think he’s been a terrible president,” Hogan says of Biden. “I think he’s doing pretty poorly. … He’s been a failure at almost everything.”
This blunt criticism isn’t mere positioning for 2024. Hogan, while he worked with Annapolis Democrats and local Democrats a good bit, has not pulled punches when he thought the other side’s politicians were in error.
“Terrible,” he says of Marc Elrich, the left-wing Montgomery County executive. “We’ve had tremendous success in Maryland — Montgomery County is the exception to that,” Hogan says, pointing to the economy, coronavirus policy, and general competence. “We’re adding jobs and businesses in every jurisdiction in the state except Montgomery County.”
“I’ve worked with Democratic lawmakers, county executives, police chiefs,” Hogan says. “Elrich is the hardest to work with because he doesn’t make any sense.”
Regarding his efforts to fight crime and stem the 2015 Baltimore riots, Hogan says, “The black residents of Baltimore appreciated me keeping them safe when their mayor was not.”
Hogan is exceptionally blunt and forthright for a politician. It’s hard to name a statewide politician who answers directly, succinctly, and concisely the actual question that he has been asked.
This frankness is a big reason Hogan has earned the anti-Trump label. “There are some people that made a cottage industry of attacking or criticizing Trump. I never did that. I tried to never mention Trump’s name.”
But the press would barrage him, he said, with, “’What about what Trump tweeted, or what about what Trump said?’ We had a press conference once where I had to say ‘Does anyone have any non-Trump questions? I’m the governor of Maryland!’”
While distancing himself from the full-time-professional-Never-Trump Republicans in Congress — he didn’t name names, but one assumes he was talking about former Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) — Hogan also tried to distinguish himself from those Republicans afraid to criticize Trump.
“I was one of the few that had the courage to say exactly what I thought. If I disagreed, I’d say I disagreed. If I thought he was doing something wrong, I would say so.”
Here he doesn’t name names either.
Hogan is generally quick to compare himself favorably to other Republicans. “I am one of the most popular governors in America with Republicans, Democrats, and independents.”
On Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), Hogan says, “He won by 1 [percentage point] in a state that Biden won by 9. I won by 12 in a state that Trump lost by 33. So I ran 45 points ahead of Trump, not 10. And I won more of all” key electorates, Hogan brags, “including conservatives and Republicans. … We showed the way to do it, and I helped convince Glenn Youngkin the way he should do it.”
DeSantis, arguably the 2024 GOP front-runner, also had less impressive victories, according to Hogan.
Hogan generally praises Florida’s governor and says their differences are “differences in styles, mostly.” But Hogan does criticize his governance, including part of his COVID-19 response.
“The cruise industry wanted to open, and they said, ‘In order for people to feel safe, we’d like to say everybody’s vaccinated, and then we get back to cruising again.’ … And he told the business they couldn’t make those decisions. On the one hand, you say you’re against mandates, but then you mandate things.”
Whither conservatism
Criticizing DeSantis for his anti-mandate mandates highlights a philosophical difference between Hogan and DeSantis but also a Trump-era philosophical shift in conservatism. And it’s a shift that could be made permanent or reversed, depending on the outcome of the 2024 election.
Maryland opened up far faster than other blue states, and Hogan pushed the local school districts and county governments to do the same. The Maryland Constitution and history vest much more autonomy at the local level, though, and the liberal counties all imposed lockdowns and mandates.
These local Democratic policies harmed businesses, students, and families, and Hogan didn’t hesitate to say as much.
In Florida, though, DeSantis intervened. If a local government, or even a private company, was acting stupidly and thus causing harm, DeSantis regularly used the power of the state to block mandates or lockdowns.
Is conservatism about limited government, local control, and following rules? That’s a very pre-Trump view.
Or is conservatism about answering left-wing overreach with equivalent force? That’s the ascendant view since 2016.
Many questions like this hang over Hogan’s run and his fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.
Does nicer populism have any cachet, or is the nastiness of Trump central to his populist appeal? What evidence is there that Republican primary voters care about a nominee’s electability?
Winning twice in a blue state could be a strike against Hogan in the eyes of those who favor combat over compromise.
Another stumbling block: Hogan tries to walk a middle ground on abortion, which is increasingly a black-or-white issue politically.
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Hogan may be correct that the base has moved beyond Trump, especially after Trump seemed to play a role in the disastrous midterm elections. Hogan is certainly correct that the next few years are a fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.
Hogan hopes that the party’s base is interested in a plainspoken governor with bipartisan appeal, a love of tax cuts, a message of peace through strength, a sunny disposition, and a record of winning. After all, there’s precedent for that.
Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, The Big Ripoff, and Obamanomics.
