How Will the Right’s Influence Impact Larry Hogan’s Senate Race?

On Friday afternoon, historically a “down time” for news, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan sent out a shock wave to the news world: he wrote on X that he would seek the Republican nomination for the seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin this year.

It was less than three weeks ago that center-right Republican Hogan — 67 and a cancer survivor — was being boomed as a presidential candidate on the “No Labels” ticket. He has since ruled out that path and endorsed Nikki Haley for president.

His candidacy comes at a time when private Republican-run polls show Hogan with a double-digit lead over either Democratic candidate: Rep. David Trone, one of the wealthiest members of Congress who has spent an estimated $23 million of his own money so far on his campaign, and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks (who would be Maryland’s first Black senator).

Having governed from the middle and worked with Democrats who dominated both houses of the legislature in Annapolis, Hogan is inarguably the strongest candidate Republicans could field in a state that last elected a Republican senator in 1980.

His success in making inroads in the Free State’s minority communities is also considered a major asset. Following his historic win in 2018 when he became only the second Republican governor in Maryland history to win a second term, Hogan proudly noted to Newsmax that he had won roughly half the Hispanic vote, a majority among Asian-American voters (“People give a lot of credit to my wife Yumi, who’s Korean-American”), and one-third of the Black vote.

(The last figure is particularly impressive, as Hogan’s Democratic opponent Ben Jealous is Black and a past national president of the NAACP).

A big question for Hogan is whether conservative activists will support a Republican who made little secret that he never voted for Donald Trump for president (in 2016, he wrote in the name of his father, former Rep. Larry Hogan, Sr., and in ’20, he cast a write-in for Ronald Reagan — who had been dead for 16 years).

The former governor’s relationship with Trump-aligned party activists — notably GOP National Committeeman Dave Bossie — has been fractious in recent years. As one state GOP leader who requested anonymity told us, “Trump got 32 percent of the vote in Maryland in ’20, Some of those Trump voters may still hate Hogan. “

The same leader added that Hogan “will need a huge percentage of Biden voters — maybe 35 to 38 percent.”

Older and more traditional conservatives may also have their problems with Hogan. As Don Devine, former Reagan Administration official and a longtime voice of Maryland conservatives put it, “I suspect many older traditional conservatives will remember Charles “Mac”Mathias (Maryland’s last GOP senator), who rarely voted with Republicans on important issues, and younger ones will be reluctant to vote to replace Mitt Romney (a retiring Republican senator who was frequently hostile to the modern conservative agenda).”

Hogan and his supporters scoff at this. The governor once pointed out to Newsmax that he headed Youth for Reagan in Maryland in 1976 when the Californian challenged President Gerald Ford for renomination and his father was close friends with Ford’s Maryland chairman.

Following his re-election in ’18, Hogan ticked off a conservative record in office: “We cut taxes four years in a row by $1.2 billion. ..We’ve turned our economy around. We went from an economic performance of 49 out of 50 states to being one of the top ten states that is good for business.”

Hogan’s record and style of governance has often been likened to that of Maryland’s last governor to go on to the Senate: moderate Democrat Herbert R. O’Conor, who, following two terms in the statehouse, served as U.S. Senator from 1946-52. O’Conor’s ability to work with disparate factions and parties, was spelled out in the biography “An Inevitable Success.” Whether Hogan can follow in O’Conor’s footsteps will surely be one of the most-reported political stories aside from the presidential race.