Larry Hogan, the former Maryland governor and current Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, made a drastic — though not entirely unsurprising — turn on abortion rights this week, saying he supports a woman’s right to choose and backs codifying Roe v. Wade.
“I support restoring Roe as the law of the land,” Hogan told The New York Times days after his Tuesday GOP primary win. He added that if elected to the Senate, he would support a “bipartisan compromise to restore Roe.”
He also said he is “pro-choice,” based on “the definition of what I’m supporting — women’s rights to make their own decision.”
Hogan’s latest comments are a notable departure from his time as governor, when he avoided taking a definitive stance on abortion rights in word but not necessarily in deed. As governor, he said abortion rights were “settled law” and that he was not eager to implement draconian early-term abortion bans, as some of his red-state counterparts did. But Hogan was not what anyone would’ve called a champion of abortion rights. In 2022, he vetoed a law to expand abortion access, and when lawmakers overrode his veto, he withheld millions of dollars allocated to train new providers. He also said at the time that the GOP’s focus on abortion was not “smart politics.”
His middling stance reflected his position as a moderate Republican governor of a blue state. But since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortion has proven a losing issue for Republicans at the ballot box. With the outcome of his race potentially determining the balance of power in the U.S. Senate, and with the looming specter of another Donald Trump presidency, Hogan’s shift to the left on abortion rights shows how much — and how quickly — the stakes have changed as he tries to win over voters who have reliably sent Democrats to the Senate. As recently as March, when Axios asked if he would support legislation to codify Roe into federal law, he gave a noncommittal answer before saying, “That wasn’t a yes or no.”
It’s entirely reasonable for politicians’ views to evolve over the years, and Hogan told The Washington Post that his shift on abortion “really wasn’t a major transformation.” Whether voters believe his apparent change of heart is steadfast enough to withstand the inevitable pressure from his party is another issue.
