In case you missed it, Governor Hogan today joined CBS’ “Face The Nation” for an interview with Robert Costa on his decision not to seek the Republican nomination for President in 2024.
Governor Hogan on Why He Decided Not To Run: “I didn’t want to have a pile-up of a bunch of people fighting. Right now, you have, you know, Trump and DeSantis at the top of the field. Soaking up all the oxygen, getting all the attention, and then a whole lot of the rest of us in single digits. And the more of them you have, the less chance you have for somebody rising up.”
Governor Hogan on Fighting For the Future of the Republican Party Moving in a Different Direction: “We’ve lost seven out of the last eight popular votes for the presidential race. And we’ve lost we’ve had three horrible election cycles where we should have had a huge pick up in the last election. We didn’t. We lost before that, the Senate, the House and the White House. We’ve got to start getting back to a party that that the people will vote for or we don’t get to govern…There’s a big fight for the, I would say, the heart and soul of the Republican Party that I’ve been talking about for years. It’s still going on. We’re making progress, though. I mean, it went from about 90% of the Republican primary base was behind Trump to about 60% after January six, to it’s down to about 30% now. There’s about two-thirds of the people in the Republican Party, while they might have supported Trump and Trump’s policies, they really are ready to consider moving in a different direction.”
Governor Hogan on Candidates and Leaders Spreading Conspiracy Theories: “I always stood up and said exactly what I thought. People would say to me, ‘I agree with what you’re saying, but I can’t say it.’ Or they would know the truth, but say something different just to win votes. And I think that’s part of the problem.
And I think we’ve got to get back to truth-telling and we’ve got to stop the conspiracy theories. It’s why we lost all the elections. And this last race, I mean, with the people that were spouting election lies and they were saying that nothing happened on January 6th or that the pandemic was was fake. The virus didn’t happen. They all lost. And the people who actually won were the common sense, conservative Republicans like me, who were actually able to win swing votes, and that were talking about issues like the economy, like crime and education. They were focused on things people cared about. We can’t keep looking backward and we can’t keep, you know, denying facts.”
Governor Hogan on Republican Governors: “I think governors are a good training ground to become president. We have a lot of great governors to consider.”
Governor Hogan on Advice to Republican Candidates: “I love competition, and I hate coronations. My advice would be, don’t run just because you want to get your name known or you want to be on TV or you want to write a book or get a TV deal, or because you want to be a cabinet secretary. You should only run if you believe that you’re capable and qualified and that you have a real chance to be not only the nominee but the next president.”