Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan believes “a big chunk” of the Republican Party will continue to support President Trump after he leaves office.
“He certainly has an oversized voice in the party. … There’s no question that he’s not going away [after Inauguration Day], and there’s going to be a big chunk of the Republican Party that’s going to still follow his Twitter page and listen to what he has to say,” the centrist Republican said during a Sunday interview on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. “There’s an awful lot of people that want to be the next Donald Trump.”
Widely believed to be a potential 2024 presidential candidate, Hogan stirred speculation that he may announce a bid after encouraging his party to consider an alternative path, citing the Reagan era as a model of how he hopes the GOP will regroup once Trump departs from office.
“I’m going to be fighting to try to return our party to its roots and to become a bigger-tent party, to reach out, a more Reagan-esque party [with a] more positive, hopeful vision for the future,” he said.
Exit polls from the 2020 election indicated that Trump made unprecedented inroads with voting demographics historically unlikely to pull the lever for the GOP. Trump earned 26% of the nonwhite vote, the highest percentage of any Republican since then-Vice President Richard Nixon’s 32% haul in 1960. In the swing state of Florida, Trump won three out of 10 nonwhite voters, a marked increase from his two out of 10 in 2016.
Hogan’s remarks are the latest in an ongoing feud with Trump, whose vision for the party has often been at odds with his own. The governor took a veiled shot at the president in a video released earlier this month. The two-minute spot, titled “Another Time for Choosing,” reiterates Hogan’s conviction that the party needs to return to Reagan’s style of governance.
“In 1980, just four years after the predicted demise of the GOP, Reagan led our party to one of the largest landslides in American history,” Hogan said in a voiceover. “And then went on to truly make America great again.”
