Former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, a fierce critic of Donald Trump, said Sunday he won’t run for the White House in 2024, after long positioning himself as a possible alternative to the previous president.
Hogan, 66, wrote in The Latest York Times that while he appreciated “all those across the nation who’ve for a few years encouraged me to run for president, after eight years of pouring my heart and soul into serving the people of Maryland, I don’t have any desire to place my family through one other grueling campaign only for the experience.”
Hogan wrapped up his second term in January, serving for eight years in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin. He was Maryland’s second Republican governor ever to be reelected.
Some Republicans had hoped that Hogan, emerging as the brand new best hope of a small group of “Never Trump Republicans,” would challenge Trump in 2020. But a yr after Hogan’s reelection in 2018, he said that while he appreciated “all the encouragement” he had received to run for president, he wouldn’t. Hogan told The Associated Press he had little interest in a “kamikaze mission.”
Hogan has acknowledged he could be an underdog within the 2024 GOP presidential primary. But he also noted that he had been considered a protracted shot to grow to be governor in a heavily Democratic state.
“Is there a path, and is it definitely worth the effort, and may I make a difference?” he said in an AP interview in December, recalling his thought process on whether to run for governor. “And people are the sorts of questions I’ll should try to reply.”
After Trump’s former U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, announced her White House campaign in February, Hogan said he would “absolutely” consider sitting out the 2024 race if it appeared that Trump may gain advantage from a big field of rivals who could splinter support amongst non-Trump candidates.
“That will be a reasonably good reason to contemplate not running, absolutely,” Hogan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Previously two presidential elections, Hogan said he didn’t vote for Trump, the party nominee. Hogan said he wrote within the name of his father, former U.S. Rep. Larry Hogan Sr., in 2016 and the late President Ronald Reagan in 2020.
Hogan won his first term as governor in 2014 in an upset, using public campaign financing against a better-funded candidate. Running on fiscal concerns as a moderate Republican businessman, Hogan tapped into frustration from a wide range of tax and fee increases over the eight previous years to defeat then-Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown.
Hogan had never held elected office before, though has the appointments secretary for Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich, a post that gave him experience working within the state capital, Annapolis.
Politics also ran in Hogan family: Hogan’s father was the one Republican to vote for all three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon on the House Judiciary Committee.
In his first yr as governor, Hogan went right to work on pocketbook issues. He lowered tolls, an motion he could take without approval from the General Assembly, long controlled by Democrats. But he was also presented with challenges, including unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015. Hogan sent the National Guard to forestall further rioting.
In June of that yr, he was diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma but continued working while receiving treatment. He has been in remission since November 2015.
In 2018, he became only the second Republican governor within the history of the state to win reelection, defeating former NAACP President Ben Jealous.
While Hogan liked to advertise bipartisan cooperation with Democrats when he could, he had no shortage of disagreements with the legislature, particularly on high-profile issues. Democratic supermajorities were capable of override Hogan’s vetoes, especially on priority measures corresponding to a sweeping and expensive education funding overhaul, three policing measures and laws to expand abortion access within the state.
Hogan won a long-sought victory last yr by getting tax relief for retirees. And after Hogan’s long criticism of the state’s congressional and state legislative maps for gerrymandering, a Maryland judge struck down the congressional lines last yr that had been drawn by Democrats. The map was redrawn, leading to a rather more competitive district within the western a part of the state.
Hogan has long been upfront about his distaste for Trump as president.
In 2020, as chair of the National Governors Association, Hogan criticized Trump for delaying a national coronavirus testing strategy, saying the president was playing down the virus’ threat despite grave warnings from top national experts.
“I didn’t exit of my solution to criticize the president,” Hogan said. “But unlike a variety of Republicans, I’m not the guy that is just going to take a seat down and shut up and never get up and say something if I feel something’s going flawed.”
Describing the riot on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as “one among the darkest days in American history,” Hogan said Trump must have resigned or been faraway from office.
“The those who attempt to whitewash Jan. 6 as if nothing happened are delusional. It was an assault on democracy,” Hogan told the AP late last yr.
Trump and Hogan were engaged in a proxy battle of sorts within the 2022 election. Hogan’s pick for governor was Kelly Schulz, who was labor secretary and commerce secretary in his administration. She lost within the Republican primary to Trump-endorsed Dan Cox, a state lawmaker who said President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory shouldn’t have been certified and who sought to question Hogan for his pandemic policies.
Cox went on to lose the November general election by a big margin to Democrat Wes Moore.
In November, two weeks after Trump announced his 2024 campaign, Hogan launched his own political motion committee, saying “the party and the country needs to maneuver on” from Trump and acknowledging the speculation about his own political future.
“I do know there isn’t any shortage of naysayers, but I’ve at all times been an underdog, and other people have at all times counted us out, but each time, we have beaten the percentages,” Hogan added.