Former Maryland governor is under fire from Trump campaign as he runs for Senate.
OCEAN CITY, Md.—Is there room in Donald Trump’s Republican Party for one moderate, blue-state GOP governor trying to win a Senate seat?
Larry Hogan is about to find out.
Hogan, widely seen as the GOP’s best shot at winning its first Senate seat in Maryland in nearly 40 years, is now the highest-profile Republican on the ballot this fall who has refused to back Trump. It is a political temperament that helped fuel his ascent in deep blue Maryland—but also positioned him in the crosshairs of the MAGA movement and its demands for unwavering fealty to Trump.
The most recent example came Thursday, shortly before the New York jury delivered its verdict on Trump, when Hogan issued a statement urging Americans to respect the legal process regardless of the outcome.
The jury found Trump guilty on all 34 counts in his hush-money case. Republicans nearly universally decried the trial as a witch hunt, and Hogan came under fire from Trump’s inner circle.
“You just ended your campaign,” Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to Trump, said to Hogan on social media. When asked to elaborate on Friday, LaCivita said in a text: “He needs every Republican vote he can get. You don’t get them by poking them in the eye.”
Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, declined to say Sunday whether the organization would back Hogan financially.
“He doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point—and quite frankly, anybody in America,” she said on CNN.
Hogan has tried to chart a different path. In an interview last week as he campaigned on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he said he wouldn’t vote for either Trump or Biden in November but will write in a name as a “symbolic vote that states my dissatisfaction with where the party is.”
“I’m trying to get us back to what I think the GOP is and always has been and that we’ve strayed away from,” Hogan said, adding that he wasn’t bothered by criticism from Trump. “It doesn’t matter to me what he says about me—I’m just going to do whatever I think is right.”
Hogan, a popular two-term former governor of Maryland who publicly battled cancer while in office, is now running against Democrat Angela Alsobrooks, the county executive of Prince George’s County, who won the hard-fought Democratic primary last month. Democrats currently control the Senate 51-49, and Republicans see the race to fill the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.) as an opportunity to help them wrest back the majority.
Hogan is ahead of Alsobrooks by almost 7 percentage points in the Real Clear Politics average of polls, but Democrats have said they expect his lead to dissipate as the race becomes more of a referendum on which party should control the Senate.
Democrats said Hogan, if elected, would help advance a GOP agenda and potentially a second Trump administration.
“Mitch McConnell recruited Republican Larry Hogan to give them a Senate majority and Hogan’s been clear and consistent that he will caucus with Republicans,” said Maryland Democratic Party spokeswoman Lindsay Reilly.
For years, Hogan has been among a small band of Republicans willing to break with Trump. Other critics including Reps. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.) have left Congress, and soon, Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah) will join them. Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley has said that she would vote for Trump, leaving Hogan as the highest profile GOP candidate who is willing to criticize the party’s standard-bearer.
