Republican Maryland Governor Larry Hogan is crying foul after the Democratic Governors’ Association (DGA) supported a Trump-backed candidate in the Republican Gubernatorial primary election last week.
“It was kind of unprecedented collusion between the Democratic Governors Association and Donald Trump,” Hogan said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Dan Cox, who enjoyed an endorsement from former President Donald Trump, easily defeated Hogan’s preferred candidate Kelly Schulz in the GOP’s primary election last week. Hogan, who has a reputation for being a moderate Republican in the blue state of Maryland, cannot run again due to term limits.
Hogan warned that Cox would be unelectable in November and called him “a QAnon whack job.” Cox has backed former President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and chartered buses to the January 6, 2021 “Stop the steal” rally that turned into a riot and siege on the Capitol building.
Cox initially declined to condemn the riots, stating without evidence that the violence that day was caused by “Antifa infiltrators.” He also tweeted that day that former Vice President Mike Pence was a “traitor.” Pence faced criticism from the right wing of his party for not going along with Trump’s plan to overturn the election results.
Cox, who is currently a state delegate, would eventually backtrack, lightly denouncing the violence after fellow delegate members called for his expulsion from the Maryland General Assembly.
Hogan does not think a candidate with Cox’s history has any chance of winning the governor’s seat in November.
“So, it was a win for the Democrats. It’s a big loss for the Republican Party and we have no chance of saving that governor seat. We actually had a chance if they hadn’t gotten together and done that,” Hogan also claimed that the DGA spent over $3 million on ads for Cox, while the candidate only spent $100,000 himself.
The strategy of promoting an opponent that seems easy to defeat was infamously employed by the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 election cycle. An email from her campaign staff, revealed by Wikileaks, showed that her campaign intended to promote GOP candidates, including Trump, who were seen as the most extreme in an effort to push the other candidates right and paint the Republican party as an extremist party. The strategy worked until November of that year when Trump defeated Clinton in the general election.
However, there are reasons to believe the strategy may have a better result for Democrats this November. For starters, Cox’s opponent Wes Moore is very popular in Maryland, unlike Clinton who was one of the least popular candidates to ever receive a major party’s nomination. Maryland is also an extremely blue state, with Biden winning 65% of the vote there in 2020.
On the flip side, traditional political headwinds are pointing in the Republicans’ favor. Inflation and economic concerns are sure to be a major motivating factor for voters in November. Additionally, Biden is one of the least popular Presidents in modern history. It remains to be seen if those factors will be enough to make Maryland voters overlook Cox’s extremist views. FiveThirtyEight has given Cox a 5% chance of winning the election.
Democrats are employing the strategy elsewhere. They also backed GOP candidates in gubernatorial primaries in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Illinois.