Maryland GOP Gov. Larry Hogan will call for a “course correction” for the Republican Party following the Trump administration during a speech Tuesday night, according to prepared remarks obtained by CNN.
“A party that lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, and that couldn’t even beat Joe Biden, is desperately in need of a course correction,” Hogan plans to say to an audience at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. “The truth is the last election was not rigged and it wasn’t stolen. We simply didn’t offer the majority of voters what they were looking for.”
Hogan, one of several Republican Party figures to speak at the Reagan Library’s ongoing “Time for Choosing” series, will also call the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, an “outrageous attack on our democracy” and will blame it on former President Donald Trump’s “inflammatory false rhetoric.” He will cite a long list of political losses for Republicans since 2016 and refer to it as the worst period for the GOP since the 1930s.
“Trump said we would be winning so much we’d would get tired of winning,” Hogan will say. “Well, I’m tired of our party losing.”
Hogan’s remarks come as the two-term governor is positioning himself for a potential run for the White House. A relatively moderate Republican, Hogan has been critical of Trump’s influence on the party and even considered challenging Trump in the 2020 GOP primary. He has said if he had been in the US Senate, he would have voted to convict the former president in the 2021 impeachment trial.
In his forthcoming remarks at the Reagan Library, Hogan will pitch himself as a Republican who can win a wider swath of the electorate, touting his wins among suburban women, Asians, Hispanics and young voters.
This is not the first time in recent months Hogan has called for a new direction for the Republican Party. In a February interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union,” the Maryland governor said the GOP has been “sometimes focused on the wrong things” — specifically citing the focus on relitigating the 2020 election.
But beyond his critique of the GOP, Hogan will also make a case against President Joe Biden and his administration at the Reagan Library.
“In Washington, the Democratic Party is dragging us in a far-left direction that America does not want and can not afford,” Hogan plans to say. “Joe Biden said he would govern from the center and unite the country, but instead he caters to the far-left extremes of his party and flails from crisis to crisis, showing weakness to the world.”
He will also compare the current situation in America to that of 1980, when the country was “beset by out-of-control inflation,” “an energy crisis” and “violent crime” in cities. That year, the incumbent Democrat, President Jimmy Carter, lost reelection to Reagan — who, like Hogan, had been a two-term governor.
For months, Hogan, who is term-limited and cannot seek reelection this year, is sending signals he wants to attempt to follow in Reagan’s footsteps toward a White House bid. At a February press conference announcing he would not run for the US Senate this year, Hogan hinted at his interest in running for higher office.
“My current job as governor runs until January 2023, and then we’ll take a look and see what the future holds after that,” he said on February 8.
On the same day, Hogan’s political group, An America United, released an online video titled “Better Way Forward” that features the governor delivering what sounds like a presidential campaign stump speech.
Hogan was first elected governor in 2014 and in 2018 was reelected to a second term — the first Maryland Republican to do so in more than 60 years. For the past three decades, the state has been dominated by the Democratic Party at the state and federal levels. George H.W. Bush was the last Republican presidential nominee to win the Old Line State, in 1988.
