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Republican Senate candidate Larry Hogan has attacked JD Vance’s refusal to acknowledge Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat as “crazy”, and warned it puts Republicans running for Congress at risk of losing their races.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Hogan, who is running for a vacant Senate seat in Maryland, said he is also concerned about the former president questioning the results of next month’s presidential election.
“It’s crazy, I mean, Trump obviously lost the [2020] election,” Hogan said. “I was the first Republican in the country to congratulate [Joe] Biden and to say to Trump that he should concede, and I was the first to send state troopers and the National Guard to the Capitol on January 6 [2021].”
At the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday, Vance, Trump’s running mate, was asked by Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential pick Tim Walz whether the former president had lost the 2020 election. Vance replied he was “focused on the future” and made allegations about censorship during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hogan, a moderate Republican who served two terms as governor of the traditionally Democratic state of Maryland, is one of the few members of his party who has been willing to publicly criticise Trump, particularly over his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
He is running for the Senate in a hotly contested race in his home state that could determine the balance of power in Congress after the election.
Unlike other Republican candidates, Hogan has sought to distance himself from Trump’s Maga movement. He confirmed this week he would not vote for the former president in November, even though Trump has endorsed his candidacy for Senate.
“My message to Trump would be to focus on the issues and stop with the divisive rhetoric,” Hogan told the FT.
He has also distanced himself from Trump and the more protectionist wing of the Republican party on economic policy. The former president has proposed a 60 per cent levy on goods originating from China, as well as a 20 per cent tariff on all imported goods.
“I’m very concerned about the tariffs and I’ve said I’m going to stand up to Trump on areas we disagree,” he said. “I don’t think it’s good for our economy.”
The latest opinion poll from the Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed Hogan trailing his Democratic opponent Angela Alsobrooks by an 11-point margin. But the Senate race looks significantly closer than the presidential ticket in the state, where the same poll showed Harris with a 30-point lead over Trump.
While describing the presidential race nationwide as a “toss up”, Hogan said down-ballot Republican candidates may be in danger as a result of Trump’s polarising rhetoric.
“I think there’s a real possibility that [the GOP] could lose the House [of Representatives] . . . that’s why it’s important to have people like me in the Senate,” he said.
Hogan, who left the governor’s mansion with one of the highest approval ratings in the country, has pitched himself as a moderate and said he would support abortion rights as a senator.
But his opponent has warned a vote for Hogan would help Senate Republicans secure a majority in the upper chamber of Congress and either enable a second Trump presidency or stymie a Harris White House.
“The question is not whether or not we like Larry Hogan,” Alsobrooks said at a recent campaign stop in Columbia, Maryland. “The question we are answering is, who should have the 51st vote?”
As well as appealing to moderate voters, Hogan has to win the support of Maga-aligned Republicans who take issue with his anti-Trump stance.
“I’m going to convince them,” he said. “We haven’t elected a Republican [to the Senate] in 44 years from our state and I’m the same person they voted for overwhelmingly for governor.”
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