Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan took a veiled shot at President Trump in a new political video that signals aspirations to lead the Republican Party in a different direction and seek the White House in 2024.
Issued Monday, the video harkens back to Ronald Reagan as an example of a broadly popular Republican president who influenced American politics for a generation. Using snippets of a speech he delivered at the Ronald Reagan Institute think tank in Washington just after the Nov. 3 election, Hogan points to his popularity and pragmatic leadership in deep-blue Maryland as a model for Republicans to follow after Trump leaves the White House in January.
“In 1980, just four years after the predicted demise of the GOP, Reagan led our party to one the largest landslides in American history, and then went on to truly make America great again,” Hogan says the video opens.
“As Reagan said,” the 64-year-old governor added, “we are once again at a time for choosing. Are we going to be a party that can’t win national elections, or are we willing to do the hard work of building a durable coalition that can shape our nation’s destiny?”
Many Republicans credit Trump with growing the GOP, adding long-elusive working-class and nonwhite voters to the party’s ranks on his way to a record 74 million-vote, second-place showing this year. Hogan and other Trump critics emphasize that he twice lost the national popular vote.
The Republican presidential nominee has won the most votes nationally just once in the last eight elections — that is just once since 1988. Some GOP insiders believe the party will not remain viable over the long term if its own path to the White House runs through the Electoral College.
“Most Americans want the same thing: They want humble, tolerant, respectful, and effective leaders. We need Washington to get its act together,” Hogan said.
Hogan won twice in overwhelmingly Democratic Maryland, running as a pragmatic Reagan Republican who eschewed the GOP’s turn toward combative populism. After the governor won reelection in 2018, bucking the blue wave that swept Democrats to power in the House, Republicans opposed to Trump encouraged him to challenge the president in the 2020 primary. Hogan declined, concluding there was little demand for his style of cooperative conservatism among Republican voters.
But Hogan never embraced Trump.
He wrote in “Ronald Reagan” on his Nov. 3 ballot and claims there is an opening to steer the GOP away from Trump after President-elect Joe Biden made him a rare, one-term president in an election in which Republicans otherwise excelled. The GOP gained House seats and is poised to hold the Senate, depending on the outcome of two runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5. Many Republicans credit that success to Trump.
Hogan argues the outcome actually proves voters repudiated the president and his pugilistic populism. He has not ruled out running for president four years from now. “I still believe that the party of Lincoln and Reagan is the last best hope for our nation,” he said as the video closes.
