Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has recently announced a surprise run for the Old Line State’s open Senate seat. Hogan, a Trump critic who towed a moderate line, left office in 2023 as one of his state’s most popular governors in recent memory. Remarkably, his approval rating among Democrats exceeded his numbers with Republicans by the end of his final term.
As one of just two living Republicans to have won statewide in deep blue Maryland, Hogan was considered a prized recruit for Senate, but until recently claimed to be uninterested. His sudden change of mind has Republicans buzzing about the possibility of flipping a Senate seat in a state where they would otherwise be all but guaranteed to lose.
This scenario may sound familiar. For years, national parties have sought to have popular governors wade into Senate races. In red or blue states normally outside swing-state status, a governor with proven crossover appeal may be a party’s most realistic shot at winning a Senate seat. And there is evidence that current and former governors are very strong candidates — for example, despite losing by 25, former Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle still outperformed presidential nominee Mitt Romney by 18 points in 2012.
Election results from the last decade show that governors are usually very strong candidates: of the twelve that ran for Senate from 2012 onwards, all but Ted Strickland can credibly claim to have overperformed in their races. But no candidate has come remotely close to posting the numbers necessary to overcome the wall of partisanship Hogan faces in Maryland, which backed Biden by 33 points in 2020. The only senatorial challenger to have accomplished something like this in the Trump era was Doug Jones, who faced a scandal-plagued candidate in Roy Moore in a 2017 special election.
Popular governors often fail to replicate their statewide appeal on the federal level for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, the issue environments surrounding state and federal elections are vastly different. Hogan, for example, was often critical of Trump and campaigned as a check on Maryland’s Democratic supermajorities in the legislature. But the issue landscape is very different in senatorial races, and in 2024, Hogan will instead have to answer questions regarding his support for conservative legislation that he may have to vote on as a senator. His answers may not play well in a state in which Democrats have had a vice grip for years.
The Old Line State began consistently electing Democrats to state and local office well over a century ago, and Joe Biden’s 33-point victory in Maryland was exceeded only by his performances in Massachusetts and Vermont. That alone distinguishes it from states like Montana or Tennessee, which are quite Republican but significantly less red than Maryland is blue.
There is no recent historical parallel for a successful “Hogan run” in either party. Even if Hogan were to outperform Trump by a similar amount as the extent Phil Bredesen or Steve Bullock outperformed Biden, he would fall short by 20 points or more. Even Susan Collins, the only candidate in either 2016 or 2020 to win a Senate race in a state that voted for the opposite party on the presidential level, only achieved an 18-point crossover, which is just over half the amount Hogan would need to win Maryland.
Additionally, Maryland’s demographic makeup presents a unique set of challenges for Hogan. Maryland is majority-minority and nearly a third of the population is Black. Hogan often drew high approval ratings from Black voters, a remarkable feat for a Republican in the modern era. Nevertheless, Hogan lost Black voters by a wide margin in 2018, suggesting that his high approval rating failed, and may fail again this year, to fully convert to support.
In majority-Black jurisdictions like Prince George’s County or Baltimore City, Hogan achieved about 30% of the vote countywide. In precincts where Black voters make up nearly all of the population, he performed closer to 20%. These are exceptional numbers for Hogan, whose party often struggles to win even 10% of the vote in these counties. However, it is still a far cry from the outright positive approval rating Hogan received from Black voters in many polls.
This effect becomes even more clear when Hogan is compared to Republican Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, who was also up for re-election in 2018. Despite representing states with similar partisanships and maintaining approval ratings around the 70% mark, Charlie Baker won 67–33% while Hogan won by a tighter 55–44%. In other words, Hogan’s approval rating did not fully translate to the general election. Although Marylanders may have fond memories of his gubernatorial service, this does not necessarily mean they will become Hogan voters in a federal election, especially as a non-incumbent, as Lingle’s 2012 race showed.
With his near-universal name recognition and a rosy legacy, it would not be surprising to see Hogan begin the race polling competitively, or even ahead, of the leading Democratic candidates. Engaged readers may recall similar polling situations with Evan Bayh, Phil Bredesen, and Steve Bullock, who led many polls in the early stages of the campaign. Nevertheless, they all succumbed to political gravity, and all three faced a shorter hill to climb than Hogan does.
It is worth noting that Biden is not guaranteed to match his 2020 performance in Maryland. His standing in polls has declined since 2020, and a simple uniform national shift would see the state swing right by a few points. But it is also a highly educated state that has shifted left in the past four elections, and so there is a non-zero possibility that Hogan’s climb rises beyond 2020’s benchmark. In any case, it is unlikely that Democratic margins in the state will fall to anything near the extent needed for Hogan to have a reasonable shot at overcoming them.
Hogan will have no issue raising money, and may succeed in forcing Democrats to expend significant resources to ensure a victory. In order to win, however, he will likely have to outperform Trump by an unprecedented margin. At the end of the day, the modern era has no precedent for the kind of crossover he would need in order to win a Senate election, and for this reason, our rating for the seat remains Safe Democratic.
Hi, I’m Max, and I talk politics and make election maps! You can find me at @maxtmcc on Twitter.
I’m a software engineer and a computer scientist (UC Berkeley class of 2019 BA, class of 2020 MS) who has an interest in machine learning, politics, and electoral data. I’m a partner at Split Ticket, handle our Senate races, and make many kinds of electoral models.