Former Republican governor Larry Hogan announced Sunday that he won’t run for president in 2024. Hogan framed his choice as as a self-sacrificial strategy to prevent former president Trump from securing the nomination.
Urging the party to break-up with MAGA, Hogan said he was removing himself from the potential competition so as to avoid vote splitting among various GOP rivals and handing Trump the plurality.
“To once again be a successful governing party, we must move on from Donald Trump. There are several competent Republican leaders who have the potential to step up and lead,” Hogan wrote in a statement. “But the stakes are too high for me to risk being part of another multicar pileup that could potentially help Mr.Trump recapture the nomination.”
The centerpiece of Hogan’s announcement was the survival and future success of the Republican Party, which he said he cares more about than “securing my own future within the Republican Party.”
Hogan said he believes the GOP platform should still be primarily about fiscal responsibility, economic freedom, and limited government. Education, a growing GOP priority, and culture war issues such as critical race theory and gender ideology in K-12 schools were not mentioned. After the pandemic, Maryland was among the last states in the country to open classrooms for in-person learning. Academic performance among children dropped in Maryland as it did in many states.
Working class voters have flocked to the GOP in response to the “excesses of progressive elites,” Hogan said. While this has been a positive development, it has also empowered populist candidates who have exploited “angry, performative politics,” he added. These new individuals on the scene have departed from principle by proposing bigger government, which is antithetical to conservatism, he suggested.
After eight years as serving as governor in Maryland, Hogan said he plans to return to the private sector, back to “founding and running businesses.”
Hogan said the GOP still has electoral promise and is capable of winning both the electoral college and the popular vote with the right messaging, that also welcomes working class voters into the fold.
“Our nation faces great challenges; we can’t afford to be consumed by the pettiest grievances. We can push back and defeat the excesses of elitist policies on the left without resorting to angry, divisive and performative politics,” he said. “We can deliver safe streets, more economic opportunity and respect for traditional values without abandoning our limited government conservative principles and America’s role as leader of the free world.”
Hogan’s news come after Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he decried an older era of the GOP during which America was taken advantage of by Democrats and foreign foes, he said.
“We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neo-cons, globalists, open borders zealots and fools. But we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove and Jeb Bush,” Trump told the crowd.