Maryland governor tries to grab Reagan mantle with a play to 'exhausted majority'

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is trying to grab the Reagan mantle in the GOP, campaigning for establishment Republican candidates and tying his message to the former president and longtime luminary of the party.

“Today there are people in both parties who no longer share [Ronald] Reagan’s confidence and his unshakable faith in the American people, and they doubt whether we can or we should lead the free world,” Hogan says in a new digital ad provided to Yahoo News ahead of its release Tuesday.

The spot builds on his speech two weeks ago to the Reagan Foundation in which he lamented an “exhausted majority” of Americans turned off by the extremes of both parties.

Hogan is expected to headline a fundraiser for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who has been targeted by former president Donald Trump and his allies for her vote to hold him responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He is also expected to travel this summer to support other establishment and moderate Republicans, including those in early presidential voting states, though a schedule has not been finalized, according to a person close to Hogan.

He has been traversing the country in support of other establishment Republicans targeted by Trump, campaigning for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp — who appears likely to fend off a Trump-backed challenger in Georgia’s primary next week — and fundraising for the Republican Governors Association, which he helped push to take a stand in defiance of Trump and in support of incumbent Republican governors.

“We won’t win back the White House by nominating Donald Trump or a cheap impersonation of him,” Hogan says in the Reagan Foundation speech.

The electorate writ large does seem overwrought after five years of drama from the Trump White House, the onset of a global pandemic, the Jan. 6 attack, the first land war in Europe since World War II and many other significant events.

But it remains unclear whether there’s room for Reagan-style politicians in the current Republican Party that’s still firmly dominated by Trump and his style of MAGA nationalist populism. It’s equally unclear whether Hogan alone would dominate a possible Reagan lane in 2024, amid stiff competition for the mantle from politicians like former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Despite the Jan. 6 attack and Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, nearly all polling of Republicans shows the majority still broadly supports the former president as the de facto frontrunner for the 2024 nomination, should he seek it.

No high-profile Republicans have formally declared their candidacies for the 2024 nomination. But Hogan and a number of other possible candidates, from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to Trump himself, have been staking their claims in the precampaign stage of the 2024 race.

The trouble for Hogan and others seeking the Reagan mantle is that he is a “reminder of where the Republican Party used to be and not where it’s going,” said longtime Republican pollster Michael Cohen (not the former Trump lawyer).

But elections held since Trump’s 2020 loss have also given a clear sense of the limits of his hold on the party. Glenn Youngkin won a surprise victory in the Virginia governor’s race last November in large part by avoiding Trump’s election lies and playing up issues that resonate more with establishment Republicans and independents. In Republican primary battles in the past few weeks, moderate and establishment-backed candidates have shown surprising success, although not always enough to knock out Trump’s preferred candidates.

And a recent NBC News poll found that the number of Republican voters who identified mainly with Trump or with the GOP has effectively flipped since Trump left office. In September 2020, 53% of Republicans identified primarily with Trump, significantly more than the 37% who identified mainly with the GOP. But now, 58% call themselves supporters of the Republican Party, and just 37% choose Trump.

Cohen estimates that the Reagan lane, which plays to the mainstream of the Republican Party, “gets you about 10 [to] 25% of the party.” He added that the “mixed bag” of election wins over four decades has led the party to learn from its losses and move on. But Trump, with his election lie, hasn’t let the party learn from the loss of 2020, Cohen said.

“If you don’t accept a loss, you don’t learn. If you don’t learn, you don’t move on,” Cohen said. “That’s where the majority of the GOP is today, believing MAGA is the way to victory. That’s why Trump remains powerful, because he brought them a win and allowed them to think they didn’t take the loss four years later.”