Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who was considering an insurgent White House bid that would have championed traditional GOP values, will not challenge President Donald Trump for the Republican Party’s 2020 nomination.
“I’m not going to be a candidate for president in 2020,” Hogan said in an interview.
Hogan’s choice dashes the political hopes of Trump’s leading GOP critics, who have wooed the popular Maryland governor for months and connected him with key players in early voting states — and comes as other top Republicans are shying away from jumping into the presidential fray.
While Hogan acknowledged that Trump’s enduring popularity with most Republicans would have been difficult to overcome, he said his decision was driven by his desire to govern without being pulled into an unpredictable political maelstrom that would keep him away from Annapolis.
“I have a commitment to the 6 million people of Maryland and a lot of work to do, things we haven’t completed,” Hogan said. Another factor he cited was his ongoing role at the National Governors Association, a bipartisan group of the nation’s governors, which he will begin to chair in July.
Hogan is the latest disappointment for the “Never Trump” wing of the Republican Party, which has labored for months to recruit Hogan and other prominent GOP figures, such as former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, to challenge Trump. That bloc, which includes traditional conservatives appalled by Trump’s nationalism and moderate Republicans who are uneasy with the president’s conduct, has been informally led by veteran commentators such as William Kristol.
“There is no path right now for me,” Kasich said Friday on CNN. “I don’t see a way to get there.” He said the reality is that “90% of the Republican Party supports” Trump.
Despite bowing out of the 2020 discussion, Hogan said he is not retreating from national the political scene and will continue to engage in the debates that are raging in the Republican Party over its future.
“We need to have a bigger tent and find a way to get things done,” Hogan said. “We need some civility and bipartisanship. Our politics are broken. Washington is broken. But we have a story to tell.”
This week, Hogan will launch An America United, an advocacy organization that he said would attempt to “transcend partisanship” and rally both parties around such issues as infrastructure. And he will continue to stay close to mainstream GOP leaders and donors, starting with a visit next weekend to the E2 Summit in Utah, which is hosted annually by Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah.
Hogan, 63, made his decision following conversations with his family over the past week in Ocean City, Md., where his wife, Yumi, and their three daughters privately shared their views on a long-shot campaign as they took his grandchildren to get “french fries and ice cream on the boardwalk,” the governor said
“We got up every morning, walked on the beach and saw the sunrise, watched some sunsets. We were really just thinking. I would say there were mixed reviews” about the possibility, Hogan said. “The kids were pretty excited about it. My wife thinks it was the right decision not to.”
Hogan added, “Her big push was, ‘You just got reelected to a second term as governor. You made a commitment to the people of Maryland and that’s where your focus should be.’ She said there is plenty of time to think about the future but right now my attention should be on my day job.”
Hogan also thought of his father, the late Maryland congressman Lawrence Hogan Sr., as he moved closer to a final decision in recent weeks. The older Hogan famously was the first GOP member of the House Judiciary Committee to call for President Richard Nixon’s impeachment in 1974 — and Hogan weighed whether his father would have encouraged him to take on Trump.
“I think my dad would be very proud of me, in terms of what we have been able to accomplish as governor of Maryland. But I think he probably would be, if he were here, on the side of lobbying me to run,” Hogan said. “He wasn’t here to work me over, but I was thinking about him.”
Hogan dismissed the suggestion that his new advocacy group, with its national agenda and emphasis on bipartisanship, could be a precursor to an independent presidential campaign against Trump.
“No, no, no — it’s not,” Hogan said. “It’s not about a third party run or anything like that. I’m not hedging my bets.”
Hogan’s appeal to conservatives would certainly have been tested if he joined the race. As a Roman Catholic, he said he is “personally opposed to abortion.”
But as governor, he has not tried to restrict access to the procedure, and he said he has “never taken any actions that would take away somebody else’s ability to make that decision for themselves.”
Trump’s signature issue of immigration would have been another battleground. Although Hogan asked the federal government in 2015 to stop sending Syrian refugees to Maryland unless they were more thoroughly vetted, he pressed the Trump administration this year to grant more work visas to immigrant laborers, and has protested family separations by recalling a small Maryland National Guard contingent from the southern border.
Kristol, the conservative commentator, attended a Baltimore Orioles baseball game in April where he huddled with Hogan and Hogan’s confidant and political strategist, Russ Schriefer, to talk about the 2020 presidential race. Kristol told Hogan that his ability to win twice in deep blue Maryland could resonate with Republican voters, particularly after the party’s losses in the 2018 midterm elections.
Hogan and Kasich have listened to those kinds of pitches but remained reluctant to launch campaigns that would force them to fend off Trump, who is known for savaging his opponents at every turn, and rally support in a party that remains firmly in Trump’s grip even amid controversy.
Hogan said, “I never liked the terminology, ‘Never Trumper,’ ” and said that while he respects the people who lead that movement, he has never considered that movement to be his political base.
On Capitol Hill, the lone Republican to call for Trump’s impeachment in the wake of the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice has been Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, underscoring the uphill battle facing Trump’s critics.
Hogan said he admired Amash for speaking out, but said, “I’m not sure I’d go as far as he’s willing to go. I don’t think we should have impeachment proceedings at this point. We’ve been through two years of this pretty in-depth investigation.” He said the 2020 election, rather than a “partisan” impeachment process, is the best way of holding Trump to account in the coming year.
There is one notable Republican who is challenging Trump: former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, who announced his campaign in April.
But Weld last won an election in 1994 and has drifted politically, serving as the vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 2016.