Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan Will Not Run for President

(The Washington Post) — Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan said Sunday that he will not seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024, in a move that avoids a showdown with Donald Trump, the former president whom Hogan has unsuccessfully sought to steer his party away from.

In a statement, Hogan said that the party “must move on from Donald Trump” and that “the stakes are too high for me to risk being part of another multicar pileup that could help Mr. Trump recapture the nomination.”

In 2016, more than a dozen people ran for the Republican nomination, effectively splitting the opposition vote to Trump, the best-known candidate in the race, who won the nomination with a plurality of the party’s supporters.

Hogan also added that after eight years as governor, “I have no desire to put my family through another grueling campaign just for experience.”

Hogan’s announcement, echoed in a tv appearance and an op-ed in the New York Times, comes as Trump leads a small, but potentially growing, field of challengers for the Republican nomination. That field includes Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador under Trump and former governor of South Carolina, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. It is also expected to include more popular figures such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R); Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R); Mike Pompeo, former secretary of state under Trump; and Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence.

Hogan did not signal whom he would support, but he continued his criticism of the culture-war grievance politics that have been used by Trump, and more recently DeSantis, to energize the base of the party. In his statement, Hogan said that “the excesses of progressive elites” created an opportunity for the GOP, “but many in the Republican Party falsely believe that the best way to reach these voters is through more angry, performative politics and bigger government.”

“I did give it serious consideration,” Hogan said during an appearance Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” He called it a “tough decision.”

Trump won a straw poll of potential 2024 candidates at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland on Saturday, casting his third run for president as a continuation of the grievance politics that propelled him into the Oval Office in 2016 and that marked his refusal to acknowledge his loss in 2020.

Hogan criticized Trump in 2016 and in 2020, adding that he cast a vote for the deceased former president Ronald Reagan rather than voting for Trump. In January 2021, Hogan called for Trump to resign or be ousted following the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

“I still believe in a Republican Party that stands for fiscal responsibility and getting the government off our backs and out of our pockets,” Hogan said in his statement Sunday, adding: “And I still believe in a Republican Party that upholds and honors perhaps our most sacred tradition: the peaceful transfer of power.”

In the Times essay, Hogan seemed to also criticize the infrastructure that enabled Trump’s rise to power. “For too long, Republican voters have been denied a real debate about what our party stands for beyond loyalty to Mr. Trump. A cult of personality is no substitute for a party of principle,” he wrote.