Larry Hogan says ‘more and more’ people saying he should run for president

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said in an interview published on Tuesday that “more and more” people are telling him he should run for president, comments that come while he visits early presidential primary state New Hampshire this week.

“More and more people are encouraging me to consider it,” Hogan told CBS News in a phone interview.

“There’s a diminishing number of folks that are wanting the former president, Trump, to run. There’s a growing number of people that are looking for our kind of successful, bigger-tent politics,” he added.

Hogan noted to the network that a final decision on a White House bid would not be made until January.

Hogan will be in New Hampshire both Tuesday and Wednesday, attending over 20 events in the state, according to CBS News. He’s in the Northeast state to talk with trade workers and business workers and discuss a five-point proposal aimed at addressing inflation, which has reached a 40-year high this year.

A New York Times-Siena College poll released on Tuesday found that nearly half of Republican primary voters are interested in someone other than former President Trump running in 2024.

Voters between the ages of 18-29 and 30-44 are mildly enthusiastic about Trump as a candidate in the next presidential cycle, with 41 percent and 44 percent supporting him, respectively.

Also noteworthy from the poll is that the more educated the primary voter is, the less likely they are to support a 2024 Trump bid. The poll found that 29 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree and 26 percent with a graduate degree supported the former president compared to 52 percent with some college experience and 62 percent with a high school education or less.

“Donald Trump was the least popular president in American history until Joe Biden, and Joe Biden is breaking the records. There’s a solid 60 percent of people in America who don’t want either one of them to be nominees or the next president,” Hogan told CBS News. 

Hogan warned against Trump making a third presidential bid in 2024; the Maryland governor has been a frequent critic of Trump.

“It sure could upset the applecart,” Hogan told the network. “[During his term], we had the worst four years for electoral politics since the 1930s. We lost the White House, the Senate, the House — we can’t repeat that again. I mean, he already lost to Joe Biden. That’s hard to do.”