Brian Witte/AP Photo
Then-Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan spoke at a news conference, January 11, 2022, in Annapolis, Maryland, where he said he planned to remain focused on being governor and did not have a “burning desire to serve in the U.S. Senate.”
The Alabama Supreme Court didn’t do Larry Hogan any favors. If there was a way to sap the energy out of a Republican-in-a-blue-state Senate campaign, the justices declaring frozen embryos to be children, and calling into question the legality of in vitro fertilization (IVF), provided the perfect road map. In a different time and place, Hogan—popular two-term Republican governor, proven Democratic vote-getter, and one of the last of the so-called GOP moderates left standing—would have been set to glide into the upper chamber.
But that time is not 2024 and Maryland is not that place. The landscape for Hogan is much rougher than his “underdog” declaration hints at, beginning and ending with the reproductive rights battlefield. “If you juxtapose all the frustration and the problems that people are having with the direction of the country, the current president and his abilities, or lack thereof, if there is one thing that can change that dynamic, it is things like the Alabama Supreme Court ruling,” says Maryland pollster Patrick Gonzales, president of Gonzales Research and Marketing Strategies.
Just two years ago, Hogan said that he had no plans to run for the Senate. Now he has put himself in play, only to have the weight of a bizarre IVF decision by Alabama jurists to drag around Maryland. Unlike his previous runs for governor, when he faced two weak Democratic opponents, this time around there are two powerful Democratic challengers. Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks leads a jurisdiction that is bigger than some states. Rep. David Trone is a three-term congressman/billionaire owner of the country’s largest retail alcohol operation. With the criticism that Democrats did not go after Hogan hard enough during his second run for governor in 2018 ringing in their ears, either of these contenders would be well positioned to make Hogan’s life on the campaign trail very difficult.
Stratospheric approval numbers work well when facing a single opponent in a statewide race. But those days are over. Nor is he really running against former President Donald Trump, the easy target he stood up to during the early days of the pandemic (and Trump is about as unpopular in Maryland as a former president can get). Marylanders know that Hogan can stand up to Trump. What they don’t know is how he would behave in the U.S. Senate. He is running a campaign to be one of 100 and maybe in a Republican Senate—a body that would potentially have little interest in an old-school moderate like a former governor of Maryland.
Registered Democratic voters outnumber registered Republicans 2 to 1 in the state. Two years of Goucher College polling shows that crime and education (for both Democrats and Republicans) and “major” economic issues like inflation (for Democrats) and the cost of gasoline (for Republicans) are top of mind for voters. But Hogan, who personally does not support abortion, will share the November ballot with a constitutional amendment that proposes to enshrine the right to reproductive freedom in the state constitution.
Hogan’s problem is not that “partisan politicians began launching a familiar playbook of scare tactics and false attacks about abortion,” as Hogan claimed in a letter published by The Washington Post, but the real-world, life-threatening harms endured by Kate Cox, the Texas woman who fled her home state for an abortion; Brittany Watts, the Ohio woman arrested for a miscarriage; and the hundreds of others after the fall of Roe. The Alabama decision—which could not have happened under Roe—further linked women who need to end their pregnancies for whatever reason with women seeking to become pregnant and turned their anguish into a more potent united front.
About 70 percent of Marylanders support the proposed state constitutional amendment to protect reproductive rights, according to a November 2022 survey. But the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution stipulates state laws and constitutional provisions are subordinate to federal laws. If Congress passes a national abortion ban—and a 16-week ban trial balloon has been launched by the former president—a Maryland landslide vote on reproductive rights won’t matter.
Hogan has said that he opposes a national ban. Whether he would hold that line in the Senate is a question mark in a body sending mixed signals on the issue. After Senate Republicans professed support for IVF immediately following the Alabama decision, a number of them have since said that they won’t back national legislation to protect the procedure—and on Wednesday, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) blocked a plan by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) to set up federal protections.
Hogan planted his own minefield with his strategic opposition to abortion expansion as governor.
Deceptive Republican rhetoric is a problem challenger Alsobrooks has pointed to. (Both Democrats, however, have been criticized on abortion: Trone for past donations to anti-abortion Republican state candidates, and Alsobrooks for failing to match neighboring Montgomery County’s moves to expand abortion access.)
Hogan planted his own minefield with his strategic opposition to abortion expansion as governor. In 2022, he vetoed a measure allowing health care professionals such as nurse practitioners and midwives to perform abortions. His veto message cited potential complications and conditions that would endanger people and lower standards of care for patients. Democrats hold supermajorities in the Maryland legislature and easily overrode his veto. But Hogan went on to block funding for the move, which has since been restored under Gov. Wes Moore.
Hogan understands how to win statewide, says Mileah Kromer, author of Blue-State Republican, her study on Larry Hogan’s tenure in office. He likes to focus on issues that people care about (and what they don’t care about) and effectively positions himself where the median voter in the state is. But Hogan has “to go through a heavily Democratic electorate,” says Kromer, a Goucher College political scientist. “And that’s where it gets complicated for him.”
A Republican seeking statewide office in Maryland needs to pull in at least a third of Democrats. In his 2016 and 2018 runs for governor, Hogan could count on his base in the Baltimore suburbs and in the rural west and east along the Atlantic seaboard. He also pulled in impressive shares of the African American voters in the Democratic bastion of Baltimore and in the bluest of Maryland’s blue strongholds, the Washington suburbs of Prince George’s, Montgomery (two of the wealthiest counties in the country), and Frederick Counties.
Hogan’s polling is enviable. A January 2023 survey by Gonzales Polls found Hogan with an overall approval rating of 77 percent statewide; 81 percent of both Democrats and African Americans (an amazing number for a Republican anywhere in the country), 75 percent of women, and 68 percent of Republicans gave him a thumbs-up.
That said, Democratic voters often have a fondness for opposition-party governors while voting their party at the national level. They may like Hogan when it comes to running the state, but that doesn’t mean they will vote for him or a party with authoritarian tendencies to steer the country—with the Senate hanging in the balance. The optics of departing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, among others, whispering in his ear to jump into the race do not help Hogan.
How then do Hogan’s ambitions intersect with a Republican Party that chews up and spits out moderates? He has faced a political conundrum: His popularity had a “best-if-used-by” date somewhere in the near future. Since a run for the presidency was essentially walled off by Trump, the Senate may have looked like a gamble worth taking. (Trump has been quiet on the question of Hogan, allowing his candidacy to circulate in the electoral ether, perhaps until it becomes clearer that he is some sort of threat.)
Does he have visions of being a maverick like John McCain? A lone voice in the wilderness like Mitt Romney? Or a swing vote like Joe Manchin? Much depends on the ultimate composition of the Senate. He could also end up being a simple junior senator from Maryland.
What is known is that he wants to restore some semblance of respectability to the Republican Party, something that a No Labels leadership post or even as a third-party candidate under that banner in the country’s calcified two-party system was likely to do. Taking on the GOP’s authoritarianism while trying to persuade Democrats that he won’t restrict reproductive rights any further could be career-defining or—in the case of this Republican Party, after a series of major losses in very red states on abortion questions—a career-shattering challenge. Alabama shook the GOP to its core and set the tone for the Maryland Senate race. Larry Hogan is about to find out by how much.
