OAKLAND, Md. — In 2014, when then-candidate Larry Hogan ran for governor of Maryland, opioid addiction was on the rise, unrest was brewing in Baltimore and voters were rebelling on high tax burdens, he stunned observers when he cruised to victory over Anthony Brown, then-Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley’s second in command.
Hogan was outspent, faced a two-to-one-Democrat-over-Republican registration advantage working against him and was without the political persuasive star power of surrogates Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill that Brown had on his side.
Hogan beat Brown by 65,000-plus votes, swung his state 18 percentage points from just four years earlier, and became one of only two Republicans to win the governor’s seat in the past 48 years.
Since winning he has been diagnosed with cancer twice — the first time was for non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma just months into his first term and the second time was this past year for what his dermatologist called extremely common and curable skin cancer.
He’s also taken on an aggressive opioid crisis that is hollowing out struggling cities such as Cumberland and lurking in the shadows of more prosperous cities like Frederick. Hogan was the voice of calm, authority and reason when Baltimore erupted into violence, looting and fires in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s funeral, who succumbed to injuries while in police custody.
He’s even walked in the only nighttime Mummer’s Parade in America in Hagerstown.
“I was the first governor to ever attend because no one ever goes there, you know, there were heroin addicts on the side of the road. You’d go through a beautiful neighborhood, then you go to a revitalized downtown, and then you go through another part of town where we were seeing people being arrested for dealing drugs, while we were in the parade, and we were seeing people strung out, laying across the front of their, you know, stoop of row houses,” Hogan said.
He’s not Trumpy, he’s Hogany; moderate in tone, temperament and management. And now that he faces former NAACP head Ben Jealous as his Democratic challenger to hold his seat for four more years, Hogan is comfortably ahead in the most recent RealClearPolitics average of polling data 49 percent to 34.3 percent over his rival.
The Washington Examiner caught up with him on the trail to talk about how he got to the governor’s mansion in Annapolis, what his biggest challenges have been and how this year’s race is shaping up.
Washington Examiner: Why did you give up a lucrative career in the private sector to run for office?
Hogan: I ran for office saying everybody was going to be included, it was going to be one Maryland. We weren’t just gonna focus on just one area, we’ve invested more money in Baltimore City, and Prince George’s, and Montgomery County than ever before. But they had already been getting a lot of attention.
The ones that had not are where we’ve been focused. They have issues like heroin. When I was running for governor, going to Cumberland and Hagerstown were the most shocking things to me. Because you know, I went to every little community, I went to every small town everywhere, I went to all 24 counties and jurisdictions, probably almost every little town. I thought, what is going on here?
When we were running the first time we had no money in our campaign. It was this whole grassroots effort and I just said, “I’m going to talk to everybody, everywhere.” Every place I went I would sit down with local community leaders, maybe some of the elected officials in the town, the local business leaders, and I would sit them down in a restaurant or town hall or something. I would say, “what are the serious problems that are facing your community?” And I thought I would hear, you know education, or transportation, or we need help with our economy and jobs, but what I heard in Cumberland and I heard in Hagerstown, and then I started to hear everywhere was heroin.
Washington Examiner: And opioids is the number one problem facing these smaller communities?
Hogan: On the shore they said heroin is devastating our town, in the little town of Denton, in Caroline County the smallest, most rural county in the state, with the lowest amount of revenue, the least amount of people, and it’s mostly completely rural and it’s our number one issue there. But then it was affecting people in wealthy suburbs and Montgomery County and everybody thought of it as an urban problem. The truth is it was everywhere.
We immediately focused on the issue by creating a heroin and opioid emergency task force and we had Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford chair. He held hearings, public hearings, all around the state, including I believe in Cumberland and Hagerstown.
People came out by the hundreds, hundreds of people, people that were addicted that were looking for treatment, people that were in recovery, parents who had lost kids who had died of overdoses, law enforcement, prosecutors, health care professionals, emergency care folks, and all of them were coming out talking about what we needed to do and suggestions and we came up with I think 39 different recommendations out of all these groups, and we enacted all of them and it still didn’t hardly put a dent in what was happening.
I became the first governor in America to declare a state of emergency on this heroin and opioid crisis. Where we stood up our emergency command center, just like we would, just like I did for the riots in Baltimore, or we did for the flooding in Ellicott City, or what we would do for a major hurricane event. But this was more of a crisis; we had lost 2,000 people last year. More than gun shootings and traffic fatalities added together. And so it’s a real crisis and emergency that’s tearing apart families and small communities from one end of the country to the other. We’ve been focused, hitting this from every direction, from education and prevention and treatment, we’ve doubled the number of treatment beds, we’ve poured money into marketing campaigns, and poured money into the schools for educational purposes, and in addiction and law enforcement, fighting gangs, passing new laws, making it tougher to try and stop some of this stuff from happening.
We have finally started for the first time to bend the curve down on heroin, then on prescription opioids, which almost no other state was able to do, but then we were hit with these new synthetics that were coming in from China and now Mexico.
But they are 50 to 100 times more deadly, and so, this is a problem; it is affecting rural communities, urban communities, suburban communities, it doesn’t matter, it’s not one particular demographic group.
It doesn’t affect one particular type of community. But it’s killing people all across America. I’m one of the leading voices for more federal funding, more cooperation. It’s going to take the federal government, the state government, the county governments, the local communities, faith-based organizations, and religious organizations. It’s going to take neighborhoods and communities and parents and everybody focusing on this issue because it’s killing people across the country.
Washington Examiner: How does a Republican run, win and more importantly govern such a deep blue state?
Hogan: We are doing better because I govern from the middle. I’ve included everyone, and we’ve reached across the aisle from day one. The day I was inaugurated I said, “let’s not let the politics that have divided our country, divide our state, you know we’re better than that.” And I was going to usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation where the best ideas rise to the top, regardless of which side of the aisle they come from and that we were going to try and work together reaching across the aisle to come up with common sense bipartisan solutions to the problems. And that’s exactly what we have done, we are doing exactly what we promised to do, and people are appreciating it. People that would say, “Oh you could never get those liberal Democrats to support you, you could never get the African Americans to support you, you can never win that area,” well we kept going.
And I’ve not just gone to those rural communities out in the west, we have gone over and over and over again into the worst parts of Baltimore City, places that have never even seen any elected official or any candidate, especially a Republican, a white Republican running for governor. They were shocked to see us walking the neighborhood. But we kept coming back, and I think they appreciate the nonpartisan moderate focus. They appreciate that they feel that we’ve made a connection, that we really care about them, we understand their problems and we’re working hard to solve the problems, and that we care about the people in the state and I think mostly it’s the personality, they appreciate disagreeing without being disagreeable. They appreciate the tone of the discussion. They appreciate the fact that I’m not just pushing one party’s agenda, and that we are really trying to solve the problems for all the people.
We are just trying to make Maryland a better place for all of our citizens and I think, it’s very encouraging to me that, you know when I ran in 2014, more than two-thirds of the people in Maryland thought that the state was heading in the wrong direction. And now, four years later, more than two-thirds of the people believe we are heading in the right direction. Now that’s a phenomenal 180-degree turn.
Washington Examiner: How have you improved Marylanders outlook on their future?
Hogan: There’s a Gallup poll that said half of all Marylanders wanted to leave the state in 2014, and now nobody does. Now we’ve got more people working, more businesses open than any other time in the history of the state, we have people moving into the state. They are crossing back over from business, jobs and taxpayers are coming back from Virginia and Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Delaware. We got these Steeler fans coming into Raven territory.
Washington Examiner: So what are some of the discussions you have had in the African American community that have opened a dialogue, and what are some of the biggest problems that face those communities?
Hogan: Well it’s funny, in many ways they are similar to the rural communities. The number one issue is the lack of opportunity and jobs. The fact that their schools aren’t as good as they are in other places of the state and we are trying to find equity and trying to make sure that we invest, we’ve invested $25 billion in education that nobody has ever spent more, we’ve put more into these areas, we are trying to make them more accountable, we’re providing more jobs, we are bringing these businesses in, we are trying to make people feel safer. You know a lot of the talk was, Baltimore, I was governor just for a couple of months when the violence, the worst violence in 47 years broke out in our largest city.
And in Baltimore City, they appreciate the fact that we came in and we provided the security and safety that they needed and brought and restored calm and law and order to the city, because it was the people in those neighborhoods whose houses were being burned and the stores that were being looted and their city wasn’t doing anything about it.
To this day, they thank me. Governor, thank you for caring about the city, thank you for coming in. And the fact that we keep coming back, we have programs to help returning citizens and people that are formerly incarcerated that we’re providing job training, workforce development, trying to put them into jobs so that they don’t have to resort to crime and go back to jail.
