Larry Hogan

Lawrence Joseph Hogan Jr. (born May 25, 1956) is an American politician and businessman who served as the 62nd governor of Maryland from 2015 to 2023. A member of the Republican Party and son of three-term U.S. representative Lawrence Hogan, he served as co-chair of the centrist organization No Labels from 2020 to 2023. As of 2026, Hogan and Boyd Rutherford, his lieutenant governor, are the last Republicans to have won or held statewide office in Maryland.

Hogan unsuccessfully campaigned for his father's old district, Maryland's 5th congressional district in 1981 and 1992, the latter of which was incumbent Steny Hoyer's closest race. He then served in the cabinet of governor Bob Ehrlich from 2003 to 2007 as Maryland Secretary of Appointments. In 2011, Hogan founded the Change Maryland organization, which he used to promote his 2014 gubernatorial campaign. He campaigned as a moderate Republican and defeated Democrat Anthony Brown in the general election in what was considered an upset. Hogan was reelected in 2018, defeating Democrat Ben Jealous, to become Maryland's first two-term Republican governor since Theodore McKeldin won re-election in 1954. He was term limited from running for a third term in 2022, though refused to endorse Republican candidate Dan Cox. Hogan was succeeded by Democrat Wes Moore and left office as one of the most popular governors in the country.

After leaving office, Hogan was initially seen as a likely contender for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential election, but he declined to run and later endorsed Nikki Haley instead of the eventual nominee, Donald Trump. On February 9, 2024, Hogan filed and launched a campaign for the 2024 United States Senate election in Maryland, seeking to succeed retiring incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Ben Cardin. He won the Republican primary election on May 14, 2024, but was defeated by Prince George's County Executive Angela Alsobrooks in the general election on November 5, 2024.

Hogan was born in 1956 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Landover, Maryland, attending Saint Ambrose Catholic School and DeMatha Catholic High School. After his parents divorced in 1972, he moved to Florida with his mother and graduated from Father Lopez Catholic High School in 1974. Hogan is the son of Nora (Maguire) and Lawrence Hogan Sr., who served as U.S. Representative from Maryland's 5th congressional district from 1969 to 1975 and as Prince George's County executive from 1978 to 1982. Hogan Sr. was the first Republican member of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee to call for Richard Nixon's impeachment. His parents were both of Irish descent.

Hogan attended Florida State University from 1974 to 1978 and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in government and political science.

As the son of a U.S. representative, Hogan was exposed to politics at a young age and worked in many aspects of politics, including political campaigns and citizen referendums.

While in college, Hogan worked in the Florida legislature. Upon graduation, he worked on Capitol Hill. Hogan helped his father run a successful campaign in 1978 for Prince George's County executive and later worked for him as a low-paid "intergovernmental liaison".

In 1981, at age 24, Hogan first ran for office in the special election to fill the vacancy in Maryland's 5th congressional district left by Gladys Noon Spellman. Spellman had succeeded Hogan's father in the office. Hogan finished second out of 12 candidates in the Republican primary with 22% of the vote, behind Bowie Mayor Audrey Scott's 63%.

In 1985, Hogan founded Hogan Companies, which is engaged in brokerage, consulting, investment and development of land, commercial and residential properties. He spent the next 18 years in the private sector.

In 1992, Hogan was the Republican nominee for Maryland's 5th congressional district, running against Democratic incumbent Steny Hoyer. Hoyer outspent Hogan by a 6-to-1 margin. The race was the closest in Hoyer's tenure. Hogan won four of the district's five counties and 44% of the vote to Hoyer's 53%, with William Johnston (Independent) at 3%.

As governor, media outlets labeled Hogan as a pragmatic and moderate Republican. In 2015, The Washington Post's editorial board wrote that he was "true to his promise to govern from the center in the first legislative session of his term." In a 2022 Morning Consult poll, Hogan was listed as the third-most popular governor in the United States, with a 70% approval rating. Despite his popularity, Hogan had no coattail effect on any downballot races in Maryland, with Democrats expanding their legislative supermajority and picking up several county-level seats during his tenure.

As governor, Hogan had a more hands-off approach to legislating, having never testified for any of the bills he proposed each year, unlike previous governors. He left office with few legislative accomplishments, but defended his approach to legislating by saying that he "never intended to enact a bunch of policies". Hogan frequently vetoed bills passed by the Maryland General Assembly, which was controlled by a Democratic supermajority during his entire tenure as governor, meaning that legislative leaders had to ensure bills passed by veto-proof majorities and had to schedule enough time for the legislature to override his vetoes on priority bills.

Hogan served as vice chair of the National Governors Association (NGA) from 2018 to 2019 and as chair from 2019 to 2020. In 2019, Hogan raised the possibility of running for president in 2020, but he later decided not to run. In June, he addressed the Maryland Free Enterprise Foundation, a business advocacy group, in a combative speech, "skewering Democrats who control the state legislature and vowing to spend the remainder of his term in 'battle' with them." Hogan promised to work against tax increases.

Hogan's real estate business repeatedly came under scrutiny during his tenure as governor, as Hogan was a member of the Maryland Board of Public Works and had the ability to set rules for state housing projects and to award grants and tax credits to developers. Shortly after becoming governor, Hogan entered into a trust agreement that was managed by his younger brother, Timothy, and allowed him to remain informed of his real estate firm's investments, including its finances and the locations of its real estate projects.

In January 2020, Washington Monthly, a political magazine, reported that Hogan allegedly continued to regularly meet with the firm's trustees, held properties near state transportation projects that he earmarked funding for in the state's annual budget, and did not disclose any of his nearby property interests to the General Assembly before legislators voted to approve such funding, thus allowing him to profit from state investments. A spokesperson for Hogan denied these accusations, saying that Hogan was in full compliance with the state's ethics laws and had no involvement in the decision to fund these transportation projects. During the 2021 legislative session, the Maryland General Assembly unanimously passed the Integrity in High Office Act, which would require statewide officials to submit enhanced disclosures detailing the businesses/subsidiaries and properties they owned. The bill became law without Governor Hogan's signature. At least two ethics complaints relating to Hogan's potential conflicts of interest were also filed against him, but state officials failed to discover any ethics laws he violated as of October 2024.

Despite initial speculation, Hogan announced in 2023 that he would not seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024. Later, Hogan said he had not ruled out running as a third-party candidate should the 2024 election become a rematch of the 2020 election between Trump and Biden. Such a third-party bid would likely have been as a candidate of No Labels, which Hogan said had "raised about $50 million to get [ballot] access in all 50 states as kind of an insurance policy". At the end of 2023, Hogan resigned as national co-chair of No Labels, a move seen at the time as preparation for a presidential bid. In January 2024, a day before the Iowa caucuses, he endorsed Nikki Haley's presidential campaign.

After Haley suspended her campaign in March 2024, Hogan said that he would not vote for Trump or Biden in the general election, instead saying that he would cast a write-in vote for a candidate to state his dissatisfaction with the modern Republican Party. After Biden withdrew and Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, Hogan reiterated that he would not support Trump or Harris. On October 29, 2024, Hogan told CNN that he would not vote for anyone in the presidential election, saying that he "never voted for anybody I didn't believe in". During Trump's second presidency, Hogan said he supported the United States strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and the "premise" of rooting out inefficiencies and waste in government spending, but criticized federal mass layoffs by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.

Hogan was seen as a potential candidate in the 2026 Maryland gubernatorial election, with Hogan and Moore publicly clashing over state budget issues and during his U.S. Senate campaign. However, in January 2026, he announced in an op-ed to The Baltimore Sun that he would not run for office again. In May 2026, Hogan founded an eponymous nonpartisan think tank called The Hogan Institute, which aimed to teach leadership skills to Washington College undergraduates.

On February 9, 2024, Hogan unexpectedly filed to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland, seeking to succeed retiring U.S. Senator Ben Cardin. Hogan had repeatedly denied being interested in running for senator, but changed his mind after many senate Republicans, pressed by former President Donald Trump, voted against a combined border security and foreign aid bill. He also credited former President George W. Bush with finally convincing him to run for senate. Upon entering the race, Hogan immediately became the frontrunner of the Republican primary and made the race more competitive, with The Cook Political Report lowering its rating of the race from "Solid Democrat" to "Likely Democrat".

Hogan won the Republican primary election on May 14, 2024, and faced Prince George's County Executive Angela Alsobrooks in the general election. The Washington Post predicted that the election would "test the endurance of Hogan's popularity" among voters, especially among Democrats, who outnumber registered Republicans 2-to-1 and were key to Hogan's successes in past elections.

During his governorship, Hogan resided in Government House in Annapolis with his wife Yumi Hogan, a Korean-origin U.S. citizen who is an artist and adjunct instructor at Maryland Institute College of Art. The couple met in 2001 and married in 2004. Hogan and his wife are Roman Catholic. Hogan is the stepfather of Yumi's three adult daughters from her first marriage: Kim Velez, Jaymi Sterling, and Julie Kim. Sterling has served as state's attorney for St. Mary's County since 2023. Hogan's half-brother, Patrick N. Hogan, represented a district in Frederick County, Maryland in the Maryland House of Delegates from 2003 to 2007 and 2011 to 2015.

In September 2014, Hogan said that he had lost at least 25 pounds (10 kg) while campaigning for governor. He regained 40 pounds (20 kg) from eating unhealthily and from steroids he took while being treated for non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2015, but had lost half of the regained weight by 2017. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hogan lost more than 30 pounds (10 kg) after enrolling in a Medifast program.