Larry Hogan and the Lost Tradition of Pro-Choice Republicanism

Larry Hogan, blue-state Republican. Photo: Wesley Lapointe/The Washington Post via Getty Im

Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan didn’t waste much time repositioning himself before a tough general-election fight for an open Senate seat. Two days after brushing aside a primary challenge from perennial candidate and MAGA chest-thumper Robin Ficker, Hogan clarified his mushy position on abortion policy, as the New York Times reported:

 [Hogan] said in an interview on Thursday that he supports legislation to codify abortion rights in federal law, describing himself as “pro-choice” in a remarkable pivot as he heads into a highly competitive race.

Mr. Hogan, who just two years ago vetoed a state law to expand abortion access in Maryland, also said he would vote to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s Constitution, a measure that will be on the ballot in November. He had previously declined to take a clear stance on either issue.

This shift was unsurprising. The Republican’s general-election opponent, Democrat Angela Alsobrooks, made it clear in her own primary-night victory statement that she planned to make Hogan’s membership in America’s anti-abortion party a major issue, the Times noted:

“Larry Hogan has said he’s a ‘lifelong Republican’ and if he’s elected, he’ll give Republicans the majority they need to pass a national abortion ban,” Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive who won the Democratic nomination for the Senate race, warned in her victory speech on Tuesday. “He will not oppose anti-choice judges, including nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court — even in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade.”

Alsobrooks’s comments suggest that Hogan is going to have to go further than making a personal pro-choice statement to neutralize the issue. Even his “codify Roe” commitment won’t answer every question. Hogan told the Times he would not support the chief congressional effort to codify abortion rights, the Women’s Health Protection Act. Every Senate Democrat backed the bill, but it failed on a strict party-line vote in May 2022 during the period when a leaked opinion revealed that the Supreme Court was about to reverse Roe. He instead smiled upon the Reproductive Freedom for All Act co-sponsored by Senate Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and Democrats Tim Kaine and Kyrsten Sinema, which would seek to turn back the clock to the day before the Supreme Court struck down Roe but would not stop states from restricting and undermining abortion rights in as many ways as possible short of a total ban. It’s the sort of half-measure that could align Hogan with other Republicans in opposing effective measures to restore or protect the right to choose.

Even this cautious pro-choice position makes Hogan a real outlier in his party, beyond the occasional northeastern governor (like Hogan was for eight years) in states where the GOP is so weak that conservatives will tolerate all sorts of heresies in exchange for a chance to obtain power. It’s hard to remember now, but pro-choice Republicans used to be a large and hardy tribe, as Aaron Blake explained around the time Roe was about to be reversed:

In a 1997 study, Carnegie Mellon University professor Greg D. Adams sought to track abortion votes in Congress over time. His finding: In the Senate, there was almost no daylight between the two parties in 1973, with both parties voting for “pro-choice” positions about 40 percent of the time.

But that quickly changed.

There was more of a difference in the House in 1973, with Republicans significantly more opposed to abortion rights than both House Democrats and senators of both parties. But there, too, the gap soon widened.

Including votes in both chambers, Adams found that a 22 percentage- point gap between the two parties’ votes in 1973 expanded to nearly 65 points two decades later, after Casey was decided.

The 1992 Casey decision, which reaffirmed Roe’s holding of a constitutional right to pre-viability abortions, was itself a testimony to the legacy of pro-choice Republicanism: All five justices on the majority in that case were appointed by Republican presidents. And at that time there were a robust number of pro-choice Republicans in the Senate: They included Ted Stevens of Alaska, John Seymour of California, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, William Cohen of Maine, Bob Packwood of Oregon, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, John Chafee of Rhode Island, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, John Warner of Virginia, and Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming.

Now the ranks of more-or-less pro-choice Republicans in the Senate is down to Collins and Murkowski, and they’ve become extinct altogether in the House. What makes this situation especially anomalous is that there are still a lot of pro-choice Republican voters — close to or above a third of them by most measurements — who lack much representation thanks to the iron alliance between GOP leaders and the anti-abortion movement, which bore its horrid fruit in 2022.

It says a lot about how badly Republicans want to regain Senate control that they are willing to put up with a significant amount of “baby-killing” heresy from the likes of Collins, Murkowski, and now Hogan. But with or without Hogan in the Senate, there’s no question who will be driving party policy on this fraught subject to the extent Republicans are in a position to impose their views: The same forced-birth crowd that fought for nearly five decades to get rid of Roe and that is now prohibiting every abortion it can at the state level — and prospectively in Washington as well.