Larry Hogan will call for a GOP ‘course correction’ from Trump during speech at Reagan
“A party that lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, and that couldn’t even beat Joe Biden, is desperately in need of a course correction,” Hogan plans to say to an audience at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. “The truth is the last election was not rigged and it wasn’t stolen. We simply didn’t offer the majority of voters what they were looking for.”
Hogan, one of several Republican Party figures to speak at the Reagan Library’s ongoing “Time for Choosing” series, will also call the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, an “outrageous attack on our democracy” and will blame it on former President Donald Trump’s “inflammatory false rhetoric.” He will cite a long list of political losses for Republicans since 2016 and refer to it as the worst period for the GOP since the 1930s.
“Trump said we would be winning so much we’d would get tired of winning,” Hogan will say. “Well, I’m tired of our party losing.”
In his forthcoming remarks at the Reagan Library, Hogan will pitch himself as a Republican who can win a wider swath of the electorate, touting his wins among suburban women, Asians, Hispanics and young voters.
But beyond his critique of the GOP, Hogan will also make a case against President Joe Biden and his administration at the Reagan Library.
“In Washington, the Democratic Party is dragging us in a far-left direction that America does not want and can not afford,” Hogan plans to say. “Joe Biden said he would govern from the center and unite the country, but instead he caters to the far-left extremes of his party and flails from crisis to crisis, showing weakness to the world.”
He will also compare the current situation in America to that of 1980, when the country was “beset by out-of-control inflation,” “an energy crisis” and “violent crime” in cities. That year, the incumbent Democrat, President Jimmy Carter, lost reelection to Reagan — who, like Hogan, had been a two-term governor.
“My current job as governor runs until January 2023, and then we’ll take a look and see what the future holds after that,” he said on February 8.
On the same day, Hogan’s political group, An America United, released an online video titled “Better Way Forward” that features the governor delivering what sounds like a presidential campaign stump speech.
Hogan was first elected governor in 2014 and in 2018 was reelected to a second term — the first Maryland Republican to do so in more than 60 years. For the past three decades, the state has been dominated by the Democratic Party at the state and federal levels. George H.W. Bush was the last Republican presidential nominee to win the Old Line State, in 1988.
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