OPINION:
Stop the presses! Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced Sunday that he won’t seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024.
Were he still around, John McLaughlin, the onetime host of the political panel discussion show “The McLaughlin Group,” might have employed one of his signature lines to describe Mr. Hogan’s decision: “A keen grasp of the obvious.”
Mr. Hogan — a gratuitously vociferous “Never Trumper” — never stood a chance of being the party’s 2024 presidential standard-bearer, to begin with, even if former President Donald Trump weren’t seeking to return to the Oval Office.
The two-term former governor, who left office in January, knew that before he floated his short-lived presidential candidacy trial balloon in the first place. (Even the Chinese spy balloon stayed aloft longer before being shot down.)
Making the decision official Sunday, first in an op-ed in The New York Times and subsequently on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” the blue state Republican acknowledged as much in his newspaper opinion essay: “I have no desire to put my family through another grueling campaign just for the experience [emphasis ours],” Mr. Hogan wrote, as much as conceding that he stood no chance of getting the party’s White House nod next year.
“I would never run for president to sell books or position myself for a Cabinet role. I have long said that I care more about ensuring a future for the Republican Party than securing my own future in the Republican Party. And that is why I will not be seeking the Republican nomination for president,” he wrote.
But Mr. Hogan couched it in self-sacrificial terms of stepping aside in the interest of anti-Trump GOP candidates not splitting 2024 party primary and caucus votes.
“There are several competent Republican leaders who have the potential to step up and lead. 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,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump, speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference just outside Washington the night before, lambasted the Never Trumpers.
“We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open-borders zealots, and fools, but we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove and Jeb Bush,” said Mr. Trump, who won 62% of the vote in the presidential straw poll of CPAC attendees.
The former president could have easily included Mr. Hogan in that indictment of the country club wing of the GOP that was all too happy to nominate establishment losers John McCain and Mitt Romney for president while in the same breath asserting that Mr. Trump can’t win back the White House.
They conveniently forget that despite four years of unrelenting and baseless political attacks from the left, their mainstream media megaphones, and establishment Republican enablers like Mr. Hogan, Mr. Trump drew in excess of 11.2 million more votes in his unsuccessful 2020 reelection bid than he did in winning the presidency four years earlier.
By contrast, Mr. Hogan (and his “Have You Seen Me?” milk-carton lieutenant governor, Boyd Rutherford) had eight years to expand and strengthen the moribund Republican brand in Maryland, among the bluest of blue states, and as far as we can tell, didn’t lift a finger to do so. Why would GOP primary voters reward him with their presidential nomination for that?
Not to put too fine a point on it: They wouldn’t.
That said, if Mr. Hogan is genuinely interested in doing something constructive for the Republican Party in Maryland and the rest of the country, rather than just complaining about Mr. Trump, he would run for the Senate next year against the far-left Democratic incumbent, Sen. Ben Cardin. (Mr. Cardin would be 81 by the time the 2024 election rolls around but has yet to announce whether he will seek a fourth term next year.)
A Hogan Senate bid might actually be realistic and winnable, unlike his evanescent presidential aspirations.
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