Ex-Maryland governor who Republicans hope can win in blue state told podcast last year sitting in Senate would be ‘really frustrating’
Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland who on Friday announced a surprise US Senate run, told an interviewer last year he did not “have a burning desire to be a senator”, would find sitting in the Senate “really frustrating”, thought being a senator was “not where my skill set lies”, and said that though he could win a seat, “the problem was I would win and I would have to go be a senator”.
Hogan made the stark remarks, which may now come to haunt him, in an interview last May with Johanna Maska, host of the Press Advance podcast and a former White House aide to Barack Obama.
Hogan left office in Maryland in January 2023 after two terms as governor. A popular moderate Republican in a deeply Democratic state, he was long linked to a presidential bid with No Labels, a centrist group considering a challenge to Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the likely GOP nominee.
On Friday, however, Politico first reported that Hogan was jumping into the race to succeed Ben Cardin, a long-serving, retiring Democrat, in the US Senate.
