Larry Hogan, a centrist Republican, says Tim Walz is no centrist Democrat

EXCLUSIVE — Larry Hogan, the former two-term centrist governor trying to flip a Maryland Senate seat red for the first time in four decades, is willing to extend personal accolades to Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.

But not when it comes to the policies of Walz, a red-district-Minnesota-congressman-turned-progressive-governor.

“He’s a down-to-earth guy who connects well with people and seems like a regular guy,” Hogan told the Washington Examiner during a Thursday campaign stop. “Plain spoken, which some people would say I’m a lot like that. But we’re completely different on policy. He’s not a centrist.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that he agrees with the “radical” label Republicans have tacked on to Walz since Vice President Kamala Harris announced him as her running mate this week.

“I don’t know that I would put that kind of a label on anyone or on him,” Hogan said. “I think we ought to just focus on the issues and talk about [how] we feel this way and he feels that way, and he’s wrong on this issue or that issue. I wouldn’t label him a radical.”

Walz has given Democrats another dose of enthusiasm in the wake of the shake-up at the top of the party’s ticket. The Harris campaign envisions him as an effective counterprogram to former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who can win over Midwesterners and blue-collar voters in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan.

Walz represented a swing House district in southern Minnesota for 12 years that featured a centrist voting record prior to taking a more leftward tilt when elected governor in 2018 and reelected in 2022. Hailed by progressives for his record governing the North Star State, Walz has staked out liberal stances on issues such as expanding rights and benefits to undocumented immigrants and acting as a “trans refuge” for gender-affirming care, including with children.

“He’s more liberal than he comes across,” Hogan said.

Prior to the announcement of Walz, Hogan told the Washington Examiner this week that Harris was too progressive for him to support at the ballot box but found praise for some of the reported vice presidential contenders at the time, including Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA). A vehement Trump critic, Hogan will vote for neither major party presidential candidate and instead plans to cast a “symbolic” vote.

Hogan is running against Democratic nominee and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks in a competitive race that could determine control of the Senate.

Alsobrooks, a close ally to Harris who has appeared with the vice president on the campaign trail, hailed Walz joining the ticket.

“This is a decent man — a military veteran and former public school teacher — whose north star has always been the people he serves,” Alsobrooks said. “His commitment to our freedoms and to our country is unshakable.”

Hogan, Maryland’s governor from 2015-2023, for years crossed paths with Walz on policy issues as the former chairman of the National Governors Association. Where the two diverged the most, Hogan suggested, was their handling of riots over racial justice.

Three months into the job in 2015, Hogan faced riots in Baltimore after a 25-year-old black man, Freddie Gray, sustained a fatal spinal cord injury while in the custody of city police. Riots broke out after weeks of tense protests, prompting Hogan that same day to declare a state of emergency and deploy 2,000 Maryland National Guard troops across the city.

Walz’s delayed response to the Black Lives Matter riots that engulfed Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd has received renewed scrutiny since being tapped by Harris.

The Trump campaign has seized on Walz for having “allowed Minneapolis to burn” by not activating the National Guard sooner. Walz signed an executive order authorizing troops and sent a few hundred of them the day after violence first broke out, but they were tasked with protecting certain buildings and first responders rather than responding to the epicenter of the rioting. Additional troops were authorized over the coming days.

Walz later called Minneapolis’s response an “abject failure.”

“It was sort of the tale of two cities,” Hogan said. “We had the best response in the country, and I think, frankly, they had the worst.”