Larry Hogan wants to run a local race. Will Donald Trump let him?

Larry Hogan grinned as he saw the cowboy hats for sale, and immediately put one on before giving a thumbs-up to the camera.

The former governor of Maryland was wearing a black polo, gray dress pants and a baseball cap as he made his way through the various tents and food stalls with cheap festival toys, gimmicky costumes as well as a wide array of steaming arepas, elotes and grills churning out delicious beef and pork. He stopped at every stall, even dipping behind the counter for pics with the workers.

The Maryland Fiesta Latina was one of several campaign stops for the governor on a busy weekend that included a remembrance walk for a young woman murdered on a hiking trail northeast of Baltimore. In the sweltering heat, singers belted out lyrics to a crowd of a few hundred while others escaped the sun in what little shade a few tents could offer at the venue — a grass field in the middle of the Timonium horse track.

Hogan was all smiles, however, as more and more families approached him, many gripping wriggly, uncomfortable youngsters who didn’t understand why their parents were pulling them into pictures with some stranger. The former gov treated the fairgrounds like a mini-Iowa State Fair (having declined that experience when he turned down a White House run) as he shook hands and took photo after photo.

Out of the glare of the sun, he sat down for a few minutes to speak about where his race stands (after declining my offer of checking out the tequila tasting first). Maryland’s Senate race, he reasoned, looks virtually the same as it did one month ago — before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and gave Democrats around the country a breath of new life with the sudden coalescing of a massive wave of support around his VP, Kamala Harris. She accepted the Democratic nomination in a virtual roll call on Friday, after being unchallenged for the role.

“You know, right now, it’s like, we’re seeing that every couple of days [there’s] a huge shift in what’s happening politically. And I think what happens right now’s not necessarily what’s gonna matter in November,” Hogan told The Independent. “I think there’s a bit of a sugar high. A little bit of a bounce, that maybe continues through the Democratic convention, but we’re more focused on the people of Maryland. It doesn’t matter to me what’s going on with that.”

Hogan is trying to keep his race localized, while also walking a tightrope around what his very national role would look like in the US Senate — a position which, unlike the governor’s mansion, thrusts a politician into association with their national party much more prominently.

In the upper chamber, Hogan pledges to be a “maverick”: a title which elicits memories of John McCain as well as more current examples like the GOP’s Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney, the latter of whom is departing Congress and thereby dodging a certain Trump-backed primary challenge. Swiping at his opponent, Prince George’s county executive Angela Alsobrooks, he pledges not to be a “rubber stamp” on either a Biden or a Trump agenda.

“I’m going to be a guy that’s willing to stand up to both parties and try to represent all the people in Maryland,” Hogan says. That means working with whoever ends up in the White House in January.

“My brand hasn't ever changed. I'm the same guy I've always been, and will continue to be. And I said back in 2019 and 2020, I felt like I was on a life raft by myself,” Hogan said. “If the Maga movement starts to dissipate, I imagine I'll continue to be one of the leading voices in America towards getting the Republican Party back on track to a more Reaganesque big tent party ... I gave a speech at the Reagan Library last year where I said, if successful politics is about addition and multiplication, and not subtraction and division, we got to stop turning off wide swaths of voters and we've got to appeal to a broader audience. That's what they're not doing.”

The Alsobrooks campaign responded in a statement from deputy communications director Jackie Bush: “Fighting for our freedoms — reproductive freedoms, the freedom to live in safe communities without the threat of gun violence, economic freedom to earn a living wage and not have to work 2-3 jobs. That's the Angela Alsobrooks agenda. That’s the Maryland agenda. And that agenda for the future is only possible if we maintain a Democratic majority in the US Senate.”

Hogan, in his interview, pointed to the night he heard that a compromise on border security worked out by senators James Lankford of the GOP and Chris Murphy of the Democrats had collapsed — the result of Donald Trump coming out against the deal, worried it would help Biden in the presidential race. Hogan said he “sure hope[d]” that he could reach the same deal under a Harris administration when asked about the hypothetical.

“That’s one of the reasons I got into the race. Wednesday night that deal fell apart is when I said I was going to run for the Senate. I announced 30 hours later, but that deal falling apart [was what did it],” Hogan said. “I thought it was terrific leadership on Lankford’s part.”

There hasn’t been a poll of Hogan’s race released (publicly) since June, right after Alsobrooks pulled off a comfortable win over her primary opponent, David Trone, despite being massively outspent. The one post-primary survey showed the county executive, who is backed by the state’s powerful Democratic party machine, leading her opponent by eight percentage points.

Alsobrooks’s campaign has been eager to make the point that Hogan’s presence in the Senate would sharply endanger a Democratic majority in the chamber, giving Trump’s party more power even if Hogan voted against them every time. In June, Democrats also pointed to Trump’s surprise endorsement of the #NeverTrump Republican’s campaign in an effort to tie the two men together. Hogan, meanwhile, has been working overtime to reject that grouping by Alsobrooks and make clear his opposition to Trump, the man: “Gov. Hogan has been clear he is not supporting President Trump, just as he didn’t in 2016 and 2020,” a spokesperson said after Trump’s comments to Fox.

This weekend, Hogan was back on that effort. After condemning the former president’s comments about Vice President Kamala Harris’s Black Jamaican ancestry to a convention of Black journalists, the governor offered his take on JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, and what he brought to the GOP ticket.

With a reference to the senator’s past comments about his running mate, which have included comparisons to Adolf Hitler and insults aimed at his intelligence, Hogan said he didn’t think anyone really knew the “real” JD Vance.

“I don’t know JD Vance. I’ve never met him,” said Hogan. “I’ve heard, you know, he used to say things really critical of Trump — and now he’s pretty much completely changed. So I don’t know the real JD Vance. I just know that those kinds of comments are not helpful.”

He also offered his take on the Ohio senator’s comments about women, which have included support for giving Americans with children more votes in elections and raging repeatedly about the supposed “childless cat ladies” running America “via the Democrats”.

Regarding Vance and Trump, the governor was asked directly: “Do you think they have a problem with women, just in general?”

“Oh, there’s no question about that,” Hogan responded. “Look, I overperformed with women in both [of my] races, I think more than any Republican in the country. I had a reverse gender gap.”

“I had much higher numbers among women than men, which no Republican has. But I think it’s about the issues, and it’s about the way they talk,” Hogan continued, listing the reasons he thought the Maga wing despised or looked down on women. “I thought it was very unhelpful for both of them to make those kinds of comments. It’s not going to help them... it doesn’t seem like he’s getting off to the kind of start they’d hoped.”