Potomac, Maryland — Senate Democrats kicked off the new year resigned to their 2024 reality: a brutal political map that is likely to tilt their 51–49 majority back into Republican hands. Then came some more bad news.
On February 9, Larry Hogan — the popular, anti–Donald Trump Republican ex-two-term governor — announced that he will run for retiring Democratic senator Ben Cardin’s seat in deep-blue Maryland, a state that Senate Democrats thought they’d have on lock in November but will now have to invest in heavily to protect.
His entrance in Maryland’s open Senate race adds an experienced name to Senate Republican leaders’ already long list of strong and vetted candidates in 2024 — a year when Democratic incumbents are up for reelection in a number of red and purple states such as Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania. (Deep-red West Virginia is already seen as a lost cause now that centrist Democratic senator Joe Manchin is retiring.)
And while Maryland still stands deep blue, Hogan’s candidacy means Democrats can no longer take the state for granted. Whether Democrats nominate Prince George’s County executive Angela Alsobrooks or wealthy Total Wine & More founder and congressman David Trone, the party’s eventual Senate nominee will likely lean on national resources to keep Cardin’s seat in a year when vulnerable Democrats in other battlegrounds will need every penny they can get.
Hogan’s early-February Senate announcement came as a welcome surprise to Senate Republicans, some of whom had tried unsuccessfully to recruit him to run against the state’s junior Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen last cycle.
“They’ve been trying to convince me to do this for a long time,” Hogan told National Review and a gaggle of reporters Friday afternoon in Beth Sholom Congregation in Potomac, Md., shortly after delivering his first policy speech as a Senate candidate to the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington. The former governor pointed to pre-2022 midterm polls that showed him demolishing Van Hollen by double digits. He ended up rebuffing Senate Republican leaders’ entreaties, maintaining publicly that he’d take running a state any day over serving in an often-dysfunctional legislative body alongside 99 other Senators. “I didn’t have a burning desire to be in the Senate.”
Hogan “loved being governor” and was “perfectly content to be in the private sector” after leaving office, he told reporters on Friday. “I wasn’t planning on this for a while. . . . But I just got so kind of frustrated with what was going on in Washington, and I decided maybe I can go down and be part of the solution rather than just giving up hope.”
A few weeks into the race, he’s already leveling expectations by acknowledging that he faces an uphill battle in a state that President Joe Biden carried by more than 30 points in 2020, and where Democrats still significantly outnumber Republicans. But the former governor, whose favorability rating in office exceeded 70 percent in some surveys, knows his state well.
Hogan has said he will not support either Trump or Biden in 2024. “I’m like 70 percent of the rest of the people in America, that I don’t really believe that Joe Biden or Donald Trump are the two best possible people that we have to be president, and I’m hopeful that there may be other alternatives,” he told reporters on Friday, adding that he previously served as chairman of the nonprofit advocacy group No Labels, whose leaders are expected to move forward with a third-party unity ticket soon if they find the right candidates. “I don’t know who that might be yet, but I’m willing to consider them.”
And he’s expected to lean in on foreign policy and the United States’ commitment to Israel in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attacks. “There’s no both sides when it comes to the murder rate and kidnapping of innocent women and children,” Hogan said in a speech that burnished his and Cardin’s pro-Israel records while excoriating Van Hollen for joining six other Senate Democrats earlier this week in signing a letter to Biden urging him to cut off aid to Israel amid the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Senate Democrats insist that their party’s eventual nominee will not take Larry Hogan for granted, though they’re bullish on their chances of keeping the seat.
“I’m confident at the end of the day that the Democratic nominee will win, because I can assure you that Marylanders do not want Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and a whole host of characters to be in the majority in the United States Senate, and that’s what would happen,” Van Hollen told National Review in a brief interview last month.