EXCLUSIVE — Republican Larry Hogan is not rushing into the next chapter of his decadeslong political career. However, he also does not appear eager to call it quits from politics.
In a wide-ranging conversation Thursday with the Washington Examiner that marked his first postelection night media interview, Hogan said he’s been pitched on virtually every possibility since his loss in last month’s Maryland Senate race.
Maybe another run for governor or the Senate? Or perhaps a corporate or charity boardroom?
“You never say never to anything,” said Hogan, a former two-term centrist governor. “But it’s far too soon. We just finished up a race five weeks ago.”
Hogan reflected on his recent defeat to Sen.-elect Angela Alsobrooks, certain that he could not have done anything more to wrest the seat from Democratic control.
However, he was less clear on how he fits into the future of the Republican Party as it gears up for a second Trump presidency.
Hogan expressed interest in continuing his maverick streak in some form, helping lawmakers and elected officials — particularly Republicans — who are willing to buck their parties in the name of bipartisanship. As one of President-elect Donald Trump’s fiercest GOP critics, Hogan has spent the latter part of his political career doing just that.
“That’s what a lot of people are talking to me about, and it’s something I care about,” Hogan said.
He seemed less inclined to make another run for political office, however. He didn’t “slam the door” on the possibility, but the 68-year-old grandfather wasn’t keen on “keeping the door open,” either. (Hogan was unable to run for a third time as governor in 2022 because Maryland does not allow more than two consecutive terms).
“I think I can make a difference. But I don’t know exactly how,” he said.
Hogan chastised Democrats and Republicans in Washington for putting centrists in their parties “on an island” where leadership can render them “completely unprotected.” He name-checked the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers looking to bridge partisan divides in Congress, as “the ones that are actually going to get things done.”
In public and in private, more hard-line lawmakers and staffers have long ridiculed the group’s desire for compromise.
One avenue Hogan won’t be pursuing is a position at No Labels, the centrist political group that failed to recruit him for a third-party presidential ticket this year with its backing.
Hogan, a former board member, expressed gratitude for the group’s longtime support, but he felt the organization strayed too far this year from its congressional mission by wading into presidential politics.
“If they can provide cover and support to the people that have the courage to stand up and take tough votes, then I think it’s a worthwhile organization,” said Hogan, who earlier in the day spoke at a No Labels conference in Washington, D.C. “I think they need to return to their core mission. I think they got a little off track.”
‘Some races just can’t be won’
Hogan lost to Alsobrooks, the former county executive of Prince George’s County, Maryland, 43% to 54.7% for the state’s open Senate seat to replace retiring longtime Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD). The nearly 12-point margin amounted to more than 350,000 votes.
The race, in the end, wasn’t the nail-biter that several polls projected it to be. Still, Hogan offered Republicans their best shot in more than 40 years at flipping one of the deep-blue state’s Senate seats. It was among the most closely watched contests in the country, thanks to the former governor’s ability to twice win statewide elections and court Democratic voters.
Ultimately, Hogan concluded there was little he could have done differently to achieve victory. Trump was at the top of the ticket, and Democratic voters who previously supported him were too focused on national control of the Senate.
“Some races just can’t be won. … Overall, I don’t think there was a way to change that dynamic,” Hogan said. “It wasn’t just the Trump drag. It was the control of the Senate — that was the bigger drag.”
Hogan outperformed Trump by more than any other competitive Senate race, with 43% to the president-elect’s 34.4%. He received roughly 17,000 more votes than when he was reelected as governor in 2018. A reminder that Hogan was but a red dot in a sea of blue when it came to Maryland politics, Vice President Kamala Harris’s 27-point victory in the Old Line State over Trump was her second-largest margin in the nation.
Hogan quipped that absent that “Trump drag,” he perhaps would have “won by 20 points.” Trump extended him an unwanted endorsement during the campaign, which he promptly rejected.
“The better Trump did, the worse we did, too. Because ironically, it had an inverse proportion to what other states did: Trump did well, Republican candidates did well,” Hogan said. “But in our state, the more they thought he was going to be president, the less they wanted a Republican to swing the Senate. I wasn’t going to be the 51st vote, and I said I wasn’t going to, but everyone didn’t believe me.”
Republicans will retake the Senate in January with a 53-47 majority after flipping four seats in West Virginia, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Still, Senate Democrats stemmed the bleeding by retaining four key swing states Harris lost: Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, and Wisconsin.
Senate Democratic incumbents and candidates in battleground races all pitched their GOP rivals as the “51st seat” for Republicans to secure the majority. So, too, did Alsobrooks and her Democratic allies. However, had Maryland gone for Hogan, Democrats almost certainly would have also lost the more vulnerable swing seats they managed to keep. It’s a scenario in which Hogan would have been closer to the 58th seat.
“They actually gave up on attacking me. They were like, ‘You know, you can like Larry Hogan. You could think he was a great governor. But you can’t vote for him for Senate.’ It was an effective message,” Hogan conceded. “That was a hard one to overcome.”
‘Not a huge mandate’ for Republicans
Hogan made the case that a four-seat gain in the Senate and razor-thin retention of the House, coupled with Trump’s 1.5-point popular vote margin, were hardly the overwhelming “mandate” that Trump, Republicans, and many in the media have claimed.
He forecasted that the GOP is liable to lose both chambers of Congress in 2026 if it moves “too much away from Republican Party principles” to embrace Trump and his agenda. Historically, the sitting president’s party performs more poorly in the following midterm elections. However, Hogan suggested Republicans could worsen that trend.
“I think both parties have misread mandates,” Hogan said. “It’s not a huge mandate. It was people in the middle who took the lesser of two evils.”
On the campaign trail, Hogan dug in on his “independence” from Republicans and his willingness to buck either party. Democrats, who portrayed Hogan as a phony never-Trumper who would be a “MAGA”-enabler if elected to the Senate, said his rhetoric would only ring genuine if he denounced the GOP and became an independent.
Even after his loss and with Trump’s resurgence, Hogan still is not considering “abandoning my party that I’ve been involved in my whole life.” However, it begs the question of whether he — or perhaps the party — feels he still belongs.
“My place is more with what I call the exhausted majority that are right of center, or moderate, or left of center. They’re kind of that core between the 20-yard-line folks in America,” Hogan said. “I don’t fit in the current mold of the Republican Party, but I’m still where most people in America are.”
Much like his political future, Hogan hadn’t given much thought to Trump’s presidential transition and his Cabinet nominees, who will require Senate confirmation. Some picks have given Republican senators heartburn amid personal scandals or questions over their qualifications, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary, Pete Hegseth for Pentagon chief, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Kash Patel for FBI director.
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Hogan seemed to relish the fact that he wouldn’t have to face a daily mob of Capitol Hill reporters clambering to find out which Trump nominees he might try to tank.
“I’m not terribly surprised that, certainly, some of the nominees I would have a difficult time supporting if I were in the Senate,” he said, declining to specify names. “I don’t have to make that decision now.”
