As the Republican governor of deep-blue Maryland, Larry Hogan has beaten tough odds. He was first elected in what the Washington Post called “a stunning upset.” He worked with police and community leaders to quell Baltimore’s worst riots in 47 years. Governor Hogan then faced a highly aggressive form of late-stage cancer; today, he’s cancer-free in his second term as governor of Maryland.

America is now facing a daunting health crisis with the global pandemic of Covid-19. As the chair of the National Governors Association, Hogan has been leading the nation’s governors through one of the worst crises in recent memory. His early, aggressive actions on behalf of Marylanders included flying in half a million testing kits straight from South Korea in mid-April.

Governor Hogan joined the Manhattan Institute to discuss his new book,  Still Standing, and how America’s governors can lead the nation out of crisis.

Event Transcript

Reihan Salam:

Good afternoon, and welcome to our eventcast with Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. I'm Reihan Salam, President of the Manhattan Institute, and I'm very excited to talk today with one of America's most popular governors about his new book, Still Standing: Surviving Cancer, Riots, and a Global Pandemic, and the Toxic Politics that Divide America. Still Standing is the story of an unlikely governor leading through crisis and pointing to a new kind of politics. Throughout our conversation, please feel free to submit your questions on whatever platform you're watching us on and we will save some time at the end to get to as many as we can.

Reihan Salam:

Governor Hogan is the 62nd Governor of Maryland who, as a Republican leader of a deeply Blue state, has beaten tough odds over the years. He won an election on what the Washington Post called a stunning upset. He worked with police and community leaders to quell Baltimore's worst riots in 47 years. Governor Hogan faced a highly aggressive form of late-stage cancer. Today, he's cancer-free in his second term as governor of Maryland. Governor Hogan, thank you for joining us today.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Thank you very much for having me. I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to talk with you today.

Reihan Salam:

In 2014, when you first ran for governor, Maryland had the highest percentage of registered Democrats of any state in America, yet you're a Republican. How is it that you managed to win?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

It wasn't easy, I can tell you that. I was the second Republican in 50 years to win in our state. We had not elected a Republican president since 1988. I put together a nonpartisan grassroot citizen organization made up of Republicans and Democrats and independents that was focused on the economic issues and around turning our state around economically. The previous governor had raised taxes 43 times in a row and our overall economic performance was 49th out of 50 states. We were losing businesses, jobs, and taxpayers who were fleeing our state. I tried to focus in on saying we were going to try to create more jobs and help our small businesses grow. We were going to do something about the growing deficit that we had in our state and fix our economy. It turns out that with a lot of hard work and grassroots effort, we pulled off what they called the biggest surprise upset in America.

Reihan Salam:

You certainly aren't new to Maryland politics. You grew up on it. Your father was similarly a very distinguished, energetic Republican politician who was similarly elected in a very Democratic constituency. Of course, there were a lot of big differences between politics in Maryland circa the 1960s and '70s versus now. I wonder what are the biggest differences between the political environment Larry Hogan, Sr. faced versus those that you faced in your first gubernatorial race and, more broadly, in the present moment.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I'm very proud of my dad who served in Congress back in the '70s. I learned an awful lot about integrity and public service from my dad. He was on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment of Richard Nixon. He was the first Republican to come out for President Nixon's impeachment. Although he was a supporter of Nixon's, he made a really tough decision after seeing all the evidence to say that the President was guilty of impeachable offenses. Back in the '70s, Maryland was not nearly as Democratic as it is now. It has a much larger percentage of Democrats, a much smaller percentage of Republicans. It's a much more liberal state than it was back then. It was more difficult now.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

But my dad was a trailblazer. He was elected to a congressional seat right outside of Washington, the fifth congressional district seat that's now held by Steny Hoyer. It was a three-and-a-half to one Democrat district back then. I did learn a little bit about how to focus on the issues and how to reach across the aisle and how to convince swing voters to pay attention and vote for the person and the ideas and not just vote straight party line.

Reihan Salam:

When you first started Change Maryland, you focused on economic issues. Jobs, taxes, infrastructure, economic development, transportation, and the quality of life. You did not really take on culture war issues. Is that still your focus now? Do priorities change or do we, as Americans, all care about the same things?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I try to always look to avoid the divisive politics on both sides of the aisle and avoid the divisive rhetoric. The way you can get in a position to be able to govern is to find those areas of common ground where we can all come together. In my state, the thing that everybody seemed to agree on were on the economic issues. That's where we found a common ground between Republicans and Democrats and independents who wanted us to cut taxes, who wanted us to improve the transportation in the state, who wanted us to grow small businesses and create more jobs. For many of them, for the first time ever in their lives, they were willing to consider voting for a Republican who talked about those issues and who did not get into philosophical debates with them about other issues that had long been decided by the voters of the state.

Reihan Salam:

Do you think that the Democrats and independents, those who don't necessarily share your fiscal conservative instincts who vote for you, are they voting for you in effect as a counterbalance, as somewhat to shield them against the excesses of lawmakers of the state?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I think there certainly is some of that. I talk to folks every day who say, "I'm a lifelong Democrat, and I've never voted for Republican before but I vote for you because for one of a couple of reasons." One, they say, "You seem like a straight shooter and there's not a lot of spin. You tell it like it is." They say, "I don't always agree with you on all the policies but I like the fact that I know when you're saying something, you're telling us the truth," or they say, "You seem to really care about the people of Maryland even though I don't agree with you on all your solutions."

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Some of them do say that monopoly of having one party in power that controls all the levers of power with no balance is not the way to go. They're electing a legislature that 70% liberal Democrats, every leader of every major county is a Democrat. All the statewide elected officials are Democrats and yet, they elected me as governor, and in a really big Blue year, in a very Blue state with a huge Blue wave, I was overwhelmingly reelected in 2018 in a landslide victory and earned the most votes of any governor of either party, ever. They rewarded me for ... I think most people, regardless of their party affiliation, seem to like pragmatic, common sense, bipartisan solutions, and they actually don't like divisive, angry politics. They like their leaders trying to work together to fix problems, and that's something that Democrats like just as much as Republicans do.

Reihan Salam:

One argument you hear quite a lot is that if you're a governor or if you're a mayor, if you're an executive, you can create your own political brand. But if you're not, if you're someone who's trying to make your way into the state legislature, if you're someone who's not necessarily in as visible a position, you're just getting pushed and pulled by national partisan dynamics. What would you tell someone who shares your sensibility? Someone much like Larry Hogan, Jr. who's trying to get elected at that level, not necessarily for a big statewide office. How can they navigate this hyperpolarized environment? If you want to be a Republican representing, get on the County Council in Montgomery County, for example. What would you say to that person?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Getting on the County Council as a Republican in Montgomery County is really hard thing to do. It's an overwhelmingly Democratic liberal state. One of the few counties that I was not able to win, although I got record numbers there, and it's difficult. You're right. People pay attention. The higher the office, the more they pay attention and the more they differentiate between, "Well, even though that person belongs to that party, I've heard what he has to say, I like what they stand for, I'm going to vote for them." Whereas down ballot, if you're running for the state legislature or a County Council position or something else, they don't normally pay as much attention in there. They tend to just go party line. If you're in a state that has 20-something percent registered Republicans, it's pretty hard if they're just voting party line.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

The other problem we have, for example, in our legislative districts and in our congressional districts is the problem of gerrymandering, which both parties are guilty of. But whoever's in power and whoever has a monopoly on power, whenever there's a large majority for a long period of time for decades, they draw these very unfair districts so that a moderate or someone that's right of center or left of center has difficulty being elected in a primary process. You end up with not only is it hard to win in the general election, but we're nominating people that are never going to really agree on anything and have a hard time getting anything done. I think it's one of the problems we have in Congress today with the divisiveness and dysfunction, is the unfair districting and gerrymandering. It's why I've been really pushing for nonpartisan redistricting so that we can have voters actually pick their representatives and not the other way around.

Reihan Salam:

You led the National Governors Association for a time before handing it over to Andrew Cuomo. I'm curious, what have you learned from other governors, and do you have a sense that governors have a shared interest even across party lines, something that, by dint of their institutional interest, unites them?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I've been very impressed. I've been governor for almost six years and I've been active in the National Governors Association that whole time. I went on to the Executive Board of that group as a freshman my first year. Just last Wednesday, I finished my term, my one-year term as the chairman, turned it over to the Vice Chair, who was Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York. I've been really impressed. It is very different than what you see in state legislatures or in Congress where, every day, you suit up in your blue uniforms and your red uniforms and you're constantly trying to defeat the other person on a particular issue and you're fighting for this or that.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

We all still have differences of opinion, we have different philosophies, but there's an amazing amount of bipartisan cooperation. We're all sort of CEOs of our individual states. We all share common problems and we share best practices about how to solve them. Particularly as I was leading the National Governors Association over this past year, I think, one, I think the governors have been more relevant and really stepped up, gotten more attention for their leadership of the states, and I think there's been an amazing amount, but we don't always agree. We have come together at an important time to work together as best we could in a much better way than you see in Washington, and working across the aisle.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I had 50-some different teleconferences with all the nation's governors as we really grappled with how to deal with this coronavirus pandemic and how individual states were dealing with it. We all had different things that we were doing, but we shared a lot of "How do we help one another?" I think it was really setting an example for the rest of the country about how we should do our politics, and it's what I was talking about earlier. It's a way I've tried to be governor of Maryland. But I'm really proud of my colleagues, frankly, on both sides of the aisle for the way we came together and worked together, and when it really mattered, we spoke with one voice and stood up to our partners in Washington when we had to.

Reihan Salam:

What do you see is the appropriate division of labor between the executive branch in your state in Maryland and the legislature? Because judging by some of what you're saying, as governor, you do have some flexibility, you are more visible to your constituents. One could argue that that means that you ought to have more authority given that the legislature is not necessarily as responsive and doesn't necessarily have the same scope of vision that you do, sitting at the Governor's Mansion.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

It's an interesting question. I mentioned earlier about the way that our districts are drawn, our legislature is far more progressive and far more Democratic than even the state is. They take positions that are not really the way that the average voter in Maryland would be. They voted for me and yet, these legislature is an equal branch of government but they have a completely different perspective. As governor, I have certain powers, obviously, to run the executive branch in a more effective and a more cost-effective way. We set the budget. This legislature cannot spend more than that. They can reorder how we spend it.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I can't cut taxes without the legislature, which has been a frustration. They do have certain powers. They can override, in my case, every single one of my vetoes because they have more than two-thirds majority in both houses. I have to utilize not only my powers as an executive, but also my powers of persuasion and the bully pulpit to try to get the people behind the initiatives that we want to accomplish and then try to convince folks that maybe disagree with me a lot on certain issues, and we have. Not to say we always get along and not to say that we don't sometimes butt heads or disagree pretty strongly, but I try to do so in a civil way.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I try to find that place where we can find compromise, which I think reaching a compromise solution, finding a bipartisan way to solve a problem is a lot better than just never accomplishing anything, which is what we seem to do sometimes in some of our legislative bodies and sometimes in Washington. We have to work in partnership. It's a difficult process, but we've gotten things done here in our state and we've done it with an overwhelming Democratic majority in the legislature, and that's the way the process is supposed to work.

Reihan Salam:

There's the division of labor between the executive branch and the legislature, but then there's also the division of labor between the state government and county governments, many of which in Maryland are quite assertive, quite active, and I'm curious how you thought about that. That's obviously been a big issue from a fiscal budgetary perspective, but do you think there needs to be a rightsizing? Do you think there needs to be a reallocation of responsibilities between state governments and the county level and city governments as well?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I think the division of powers is fairly clear. Our county governments and our city governments have certain well-defined authorities to make local decisions. All of our counties have most control over zoning and planning and permitting types of issues, and the local school boards have power over what happens with the schools in their community. In this pandemic, in the state of emergency, some of that has changed because we've had to take action at the state level that may have superseded some of those powers because we had to act quickly.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

In many cases, we've tried to allow for as much flexibility and maintain that same balance of power with the local governments, and it works pretty well. With the cutbacks that we're going to be experiencing and our shortfalls with these revenues decreasing at the state level, there's a lot of things at the county government that state pays for. We pass money down to the local governments that we're going to have some probably really aggressive discussions with the local leaders about what they're going to have to step up and try to figure out a way to pay for as the state is making very difficult choices about fairly dramatic reductions in our state budget.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

The powers are pretty well-divided and we get along pretty well. Again, the same situation. Some of our smaller, more rural, less populated jurisdictions have some Republican county commissioners. But in all of our charter governments, we have county executives, all of whom are Democrats. They, together with the legislature, sometimes will try to gang up on me, but we try to keep them in check and find that happy balance.

Reihan Salam:

Before you were elected governor, you were in the business of real estate development. You know zoning rules better than just about anyone. You do have some regions of the state where there's been a tremendous amount of prosperity, a tremendous amount of interest, a huge amount of demand for housing and yet, oftentimes, pretty stringent zoning regulations that have limited housing development. You say that there's a pretty clear division of labor, but do you think that there might be some calls to say, "Hey, look," to this local government, to this county government, "you're not taking the state's interests in economic growth into account"? Do you think that there might be some reason to say, "Hey, look, we might have to preempt some of the limits on growth that you're imposing on that level in order to ensure that the state, as a whole, has a growing economy and a brighter future"?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

It's an interesting concept. Look, as a lifelong small business person that's been involved in that industry, it's frustrating to me sometimes how cumbersome and difficult the process is with local governments and how they sometimes put restrictions on the ability to get anything done. In spite of those limitations, before this most recent economic crisis happened, which is hurting states across America, we had one of the biggest economic turnarounds in America going from the 49th in economic performance to the top 10, and we had record job growth in every single one of our jurisdictions.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

However, you're exactly right, that there were a couple of them who were the most restrictive that didn't do quite as well as others, and Montgomery County is an example. It's our most liberal jurisdiction, our most populous jurisdiction right outside of Washington. They did not experience the kind of growth that Northern Virginia did or that most of the other counties around the state did. They could have done better. But stepping in and trying to usurp the authority of those local governments is not something that I'm in favor of.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

In fact, I ran for office saying that I was concerned about the previous administration who was trying to usurp the authority of local governments in a lot of those land use decisions for the opposite reason, because they wanted to shut everything down all across the state. From a philosophical standpoint, I think we have to give them that autonomy and that local authority, even if I may disagree with them, and we want to try to encourage them to be a little bit more business-friendly sometimes.

Reihan Salam:

One thing that's been very much in the news recently is the controversy over the shutdown, the proposed shutdown I should say, of non-public schools in Montgomery County. That was a bit of a back and forth because it seems as though through the COVID crisis, you have wanted to be deferential, you have wanted to allow local authorities to appeal to local sensibilities and to take those into account. But in this instance, you said, "I have to put my foot down. We can't allow this arbitrary shutdown of non-public schools." Tell us a bit about how your thinking evolved on that and just how that unfolded.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Sure. This was just a large overreach by a bureaucrat in Montgomery County who did not have the authority to take the action that he took and it wasn't a change in policy at all from our standpoint. We have a statewide policy that's put together by the State Board of Education that gives autonomy to local school boards to make decisions about the public schools within a certain set of parameters. They take into consideration CDC guidelines and State guidelines, and those local duly elected boards of education can make determinations about how they want to go about reopening and/or doing distance learning.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

The state and the County Board of Education made a vote to do one thing, and they have the right to do that. But a County Health Officer went against state health policy by just arbitrarily not giving the private schools that same ability to decide for themselves. For example, many of the private schools had very safe reopening plans that met the state guidelines, that met CDC guidelines, but they weren't even reviewed. One individual bureaucrat without the power, that was not a school board, tried to shut them all down.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Our argument was, number one, it violated state health policy. Number two, it violated our state education plan. Number three, this person did not have authority over those private schools. It's been really misinterpreted by some of the media, but the bottom line is they realized their mistake and changed their position and backed down because they were going to lose in court. They realized that and quickly reversed themselves. [crosstalk 00:22:16]

Reihan Salam:

This hasn't impaired your ability to have a good working relationship?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

They were treating private schools differently than public schools and not allowing them the right to do their own plans as our state plans called for.

Reihan Salam:

Your state's positivity rate for those tested for COVID-19 is the lowest it's been since the beginning of the pandemic. What do you credit the success to?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Look, we took very early and aggressive action. We've been leaders on mitigation efforts from the very beginning. I declared a state of emergency the day we got our very first case. I think I've enacted 40-some executive orders. We had to take a number of steps that we never imagined having to take. We put together a really smart team of epidemiologists and public health doctors from places like Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland and MedStar Health, along with a team of leading business folks who've been advising us all throughout the process.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

We've been taking step after step, watching the numbers every day. We've got masking orders. 90% of our businesses are now open, but we've got some capacity restrictions. People are wearing masks in our state. They're practicing social distancing. We're trying to go about our reopening in a safe and effective way. The great news is, unlike many other states who are now reshutting things down and seeing spiking numbers, we're doing better economically and we're doing better on the coronavirus. We record lows on our positivity rates. We've been trending down since our peak in mid April. Several weeks of declining numbers on hospitalizations.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

But economically, even though we've suffered like everyone else, we're doing about 30% better than the rest of the country. We have 8% unemployment and it's coming down, I think, again when we get our numbers out next week. Some states are in the 20's, and we're doing better than, I think, 35 other states with respect to getting our economy back on track and keeping the virus down. We've tried to find that balance. We've just taken the best advice from the smartest people we could find and we haven't been afraid to take the actions that are needed, and to communicate very effectively with our citizens and our businesses.

Reihan Salam:

I think it's fair to say that you are someone who's very respected among America's governors. In your capacity as a leading figure in the National Governors Association, you have called for $500 billion in federal aid to state governments. You've called for that aid to not be restricted so that state governments have really wide authority to do with that as they will. It's also the case that you are very much a fiscal conservative. You've already proposed significant cuts to Maryland state budget.

Reihan Salam:

Now, that's not true of every state in the Union. Obviously, you have a lot of lawmakers who are looking at the situation in our state governments and saying that, "Look, not all of these have been responsible over the long haul." They're very concerned that an infusion of federal aid is not going to be spent terribly well, that it's going to allow some governors, some legislators to paper over very severe long-term fiscal imbalances. What do you say to those who say, "Look, this idea of no-strings-attached aid makes me nervous"?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Yeah. No, I don't think it should be no strings attached, and I completely understand the argument that folks in Congress, there were Republicans in the Senate that were saying, "We don't want bailouts for Blue state governors. We don't want to pay off pension problems or things that they've had problems with for 10 or 20 years." That wasn't the intention at all. We want some flexibility on the spending of COVID-related shortfalls because of the pandemic, but the need is real. There are billions and billions of dollars in shortfalls in every state on revenues.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Moody's Analytics met with all of the governors and told us that we should anticipate, on average, a 30% decrease in revenues. The ability to continue to pay for more and more desperately needed services with that much of a reduction in revenues makes it difficult to provide the services that people need, and we're on the frontline. State and local governments have already laid off 1.6 million workers. The estimate is there maybe three to four million more that are laid off. In many cases, we are talking about healthcare workers and firefighters and teachers and police officers.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I get the argument that I don't want to go back and pay for any past mistakes or to allow people to solve the problems that they were unwilling to solve. We're in a situation, and we just renewed our AAA bond rating, but we're going to spend our billion-dollar rainy day fund. We're going to be potentially laying off thousands of state workers. We're going to be making probably 15% reductions in every single agency, many of whom they're going to have a tough time coming up with that, and we're going to be cutting services.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

It's not a false crisis. I get the fact that fiscal conservatives like me would say, "Hey, we just can't write a blank check." But to just paper it over and say, "This is Democratic governors trying to make up for bad management," that's really not the case. This was supported by almost every Republican governor in America who's all going to be faced with terrible budget shortfalls. I think it's not going to help us grow out and have this economic recovery if we can't help those people in need that we're trying to provide unemployment benefits to, that help the small businesses that are hurting if all those workers are being laid off. It's not going to help the economic recovery if we're putting tens of thousands more people in the unemployment lines.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Look, we had a commitment from the White House on $500 billion back in April. We had this almost in the 3.5 stimulus. But right now, the fact that there's no money in there for the states is a disaster and it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt, I think, the senators that are making a big mistake, and I still am hopeful that we can put aside all the partisan politics and just find, as I was talking earlier, a bipartisan common sense solution. Let's find a compromise. I think the Democratic bill was way too aggressive and I understand the concerns of some of the Republicans, but having no help is not going to work. In fact, they-

Reihan Salam:

Is there a plan B? If Congress remains at an impasse and you do not see a meaningful disbursement of federal aid, have you and your team been thinking about just that scenario and what it might look like for Maryland's government?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

It's a several billion-dollar shortfall, and we're looking at how many thousands of people we're going to lay off.

Reihan Salam:

You have had an incredibly eventful tenure in office, and it started off with intense civil unrest in the City of Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray's death. Now, you're seeing civil unrest in a number of other American cities. Just last night, you saw riots breaking out in Chicago. I wonder what would your advice be to other governors, to other mayors who are seeking to heal communities in the wake of that kind of civil unrest? Tell us a bit about your experience in Baltimore and in Maryland.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Sure. I talk about this a lot in my book. I have several chapters about this. I had only been governor for 89 days when the worst violence in 47 years broke out in our largest City of Baltimore. Just in the first few hours of that, this was after the tragic death of Freddie Gray and it was at the very beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement right after Ferguson. We had violence breakout in Baltimore City. There were some peaceful protesters, but there were also some pretty bad violence that broke out right away. In the first few hours, we had 400 businesses and homes that were burned and looted and destroyed, and 127 police and firefighters injured.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

The City of Baltimore was overwhelmed. I declared a state of emergency. The City of Baltimore was crying out for someone to come keep them protected, protect the peaceful protesters, protect the residents of Baltimore. I sent in an additional 1,000 police officers and 4,000 members of the National Guard the very first night, and I went to Baltimore. We allowed peaceful protests to go on for a solid week. I walked the streets of Baltimore, meeting with community leaders, hugging people whose homes were burned out, meeting with the NAACP leaders in the community and faith-based leaders talking about the issues and problems and trying to lower the temperature.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

We also stopped all the violence the very first night and didn't allow it to happen. If people tried to throw bricks or start fires or hurt someone, they were immediately arrested and taken off the streets. That's the mistake, I think, they've made in two respects. One, they've just allowed things to ... This time in Baltimore, I was very proud of the peaceful protests with almost no violence. I think inciting the violence or being too aggressive is a bad mistake. I think being too passive and not protecting the property and the lives of the people in the city and just allowing violent protests to continue on for months is also a mistake. I think you have to find that balance, which is what we did. I would suggest all those mayors and governors should read my book.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I talk about Ronald Reagan. I came out of college, I was a Youth for Reagan guy and a Reagan delegate and worked in that campaign, and Reagan talked about peace through strength. That's that was what I was thinking in the back of my head as I went through Baltimore. I didn't want to use the strength. I didn't want to make any aggressive moves, but I wanted to keep everybody safe by having the police presence there, and that's exactly what happened. We lowered the temperature and we worked together with the community, and it all turned out very well. We're seeing continuing violence in the cities right now that's just unacceptable, and lawlessness is not the way to solve the problem.

Reihan Salam:

What do you see as the most effective strategies for improving crime control in communities like Baltimore but also in your native PG County. These are places where you're seeing a spike in crime, particularly in a number of major US cities a spike in homicides. What do you think is the most appropriate next step? There is one conversation about de-escalation and police reform. There are others who are saying that this is not the time to embrace de-policing. What we need to do potentially is invest more in public safety. I'm curious how you see it.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I understand that we need to have a conversation about improving our police departments and addressing the issues of concern that people that are out there expressing legitimate frustrations of that, but the whole idea of defunding police doesn't make any sense to me at all. It's like saying, "We want to improve education by cutting the funding" or "We want to improve the environment by investing less in protecting the environment." "We want to do something about improving our police departments and stopping crimes so we're going to take money away." It's nonsensical.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

We've made some improvements, and the way you do that is by investing more money. We need more police officers so we can do things like community policing, so we can do better recruitment, so we now have a majority/minority police force in Baltimore, so that you can do better training, so that you can train them in de-escalation techniques, and you can pay for things like body cams for all the officers and more better technology, and you can send more officers into the street to improve community relations.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

All those things take investment of dollars. We passed a criminal justice reform act in Maryland that was one of the most forward-thinking in America. We worked together with our Democratic legislature on where we reduced crimes, we reduced sentencing for crimes like possession, we diverted money into drug treatment and mental health programs instead of just incarceration. We also have a tough crime package for repeat violent offenders and the people that are doing the shooting and the killing in the streets of Baltimore, where we had 350 murders last year. That passed our Senate but, sadly, did not pass the House. I think we've got a bigger conversation that when you have 350 murders in a city like ours, Baltimore City, you can't just say it's the fault of the police. We've got to do something about the people that are doing the shooting and the killing as well.

Reihan Salam:

We have a number of questions from our viewers that I'd like to share with you. One is a question from Kyle. How do we reinvigorate an appreciation for federalism among voters?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

That's a good question. I think probably the average voter doesn't really appreciate or understand what federalism is. One of the things I talk about, my Change Maryland group, I started this nonpartisan group. I was on a board of directors of a group called the Maryland Public Policy Institute. We came up with all of these highbrow discussions about philosophically what we were going to do to solve monetary and fiscal policy. The average voter never read any of those reports, didn't know what the heck we were talking about, and we had to really boil it down to what the average voter cared about.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I think to get the average voter interested in federalism, you have to talk about what you really mean and how it impacts the average voter, and how making some of these decisions at the local level is different than letting the federal government make these decisions, how it impacts the average person and their pocketbooks and the results that it's going to impact them in their daily lives rather than talking at this level when they don't really ... The average person doesn't pay as much attention to these concepts or to the politics that we might, as people that studied these issues.

Reihan Salam:

Ronald Reagan proposed way back in the early 1980s that the federal government and the state government swap responsibilities so that the federal government takeover Medicaid outright and then responsibilities for various other programs, education, transportation, infrastructure be downloaded to state governments so you have a cleaner division of labor. I wonder what do you make of that. Because given how much Medicaid takes up of your time and of your spending, would you welcome some more clean division of labor between the levels of government?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

That's a good question, and I hadn't given a whole lot of thought to but I think there's no question. We've got to figure out clear lines of responsibility and who's better at doing what and not giving the responsibility at one end and the collecting of the money at the other end. Not too many strings attached. One of the problems right now in the middle of this pandemic, there are certain things that, I think, the states are on the front lines should be in charge of and making better decisions on, but there's a lot of things that we miss the boat on by not having a ... only the federal government could do in a better way.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

This is really important. I know this is something that the Manhattan Institute spends a lot of time thinking about and talking about. I think we've got to figure out maybe after this November election as we're talking about the future of the Republican Party and the future of the country, really delving into what should the role of the states be, particularly as the states just stepped up in this recent pandemic, and the federal government, in some ways, dropped the ball. Who's better at doing what, and where should responsibility and the money be?

Reihan Salam:

In the wake of the S&L crisis, you personally were impacted by a severe economic downturn. You had to really start all over again. I wonder, how did that experience shape how you approach public policy, if at all?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

It made me a much more empathetic person. During the '90s, we had the S&L crisis in savings and loans. There was a piece of legislation called FIRREA that really clamped down on S&Ls. Some of them were making mistakes and bad loans, but it was an overreaction to that. That really wiped out the real estate development business and the land brokerage business and closed down many of these savings and loans, and it put a lot of people out of business. It crushed my small business. I learned the hard way about what it's like.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I say in my book it was one of the low points of my life, losing nearly everything. As an elected official, you can hear about somebody that goes through a business crisis, or goes through financial loss, or goes through a foreclosure, or losing their home, but living through it yourself is a whole different story. I did and so it made me appreciate and be more empathetic to the struggles that the average person, the average small business owner, or the kinds of things that people are going through right now as we see the tremendous economic loss and the suffering with people. It's made me think every day about what the things that people are struggling and going through because I know what they're going through. It also made me appreciate and work twice as hard to rebuild from that and come back out of it and continue to be able to be a success and rebuild a business.

Reihan Salam:

Does it influence how you think about the stimulus debate at the federal level?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Maybe it does. I hadn't thought about that. That's an interesting question. I think knowing how bad this economy is, I don't so much think about Wall Street as Main Street. I do think about the kinds of decisions. I see these mom-and-pop businesses, these small businesses that are, I think, the backbone of our economy and that are so critical to so many jobs here in our state and across the country. How do we keep them afloat?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

It's not looking at it as a handout, but how do we give them that lifeline that they need through no fault of their own, they've been impacted by decisions, by the pandemic which they had no control over, and by decisions by the government that they had no control over. Maybe it's a different philosophy than, hey, a more strictly fiscal conservative philosophy about not spending money. Maybe it's a little more sympathetic to let's give them the help they need so that they can keep their business alive, keep those folks employed, and contribute to the economy and bring those tax dollars back in so we can keep providing services.

Reihan Salam:

You've been sharply critical of how the federal government has performed during the COVID crisis, particularly when it comes to just basic questions like testing and seeing to it that we have the resources that we need to deploy it across the country. Do you see some ways in which state governments have underperformed and lessons learned for the next time we face a crisis, whether it's another pandemic or something quite different?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

I think all of us were caught where we shouldn't have been. We weren't prepared. I don't think the federal government was prepared for this. I don't think state and local governments, hospital systems, nobody, and we should have been. We've done, since I've been governor, tabletop exercises with our emergency management folks and our Health Department people on a regular basis about what happens in the case of a pandemic, and it was a philosophical planning session about what might happen and how would we react, but we weren't ready.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Hospital systems knew that there was the potential for some respiratory outbreak of some type, another SARS-type thing, and yet they had no ventilators. This is not something that the state normally goes out and buys or the federal government produces. I think at every level, we have to do an after-action report, after we get through the crisis, which we're still in the middle of. Right now, I think we have to figure out a way to get the federal state and local governments and the private sector all working together to do everything we possibly can, but finally try to figure out how to stamp this out, get control of it. Once we do, then I think we have to go back and say, "At every level, what did we do wrong and what can we do better next time," because we can't let this happen again.

Reihan Salam:

One last question from our audience. How did Maryland's Justice Reinvestment Act help victims and improve victim services?

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Because we lowered our prison population by more than any other state in America, which from a fiscally responsible standpoint freed up an enormous amount of money which we then could reinvest into victims services and victims programs. We were able to fully fund 100% of every single request from every single victims services program in every jurisdiction all across the state, and to put more money and more focus on the rights of victims and on the problems of victims and on restitution and helping those folks recover from crime and the things like drug treatment and mental health. Incarceration is extremely expensive. Some of that money reinvested in different directions, and it was very effective. I think victims' advocates were really pleased with the efforts.

Reihan Salam:

Governor Hogan, thank you so much for your time. You've written an excellent compelling book, and I think it's an inspiring story of resilience in how we can improve our politics. To everyone in the audience, be sure to read Governor Hogan's new book, Still Standing: Surviving Cancer, Riots, and a Global Pandemic, and the Toxic Politics that Divide America. Thank you to everyone watching us for your time and for your many thoughtful questions. If you'd like to hear more conversations like today's or interested in supporting our mission, I'd encourage you to subscribe to Manhattan Institute's newsletters or consider making a donation. There are links for doing so in the comments window on your screen. Thank you again, Governor Hogan. This was great.

Gov. Larry Hogan:

Thank you very much. I want to thank your whole audience for watching, and thank you very much. Appreciate the institute giving me the opportunity.

Reihan Salam:

It's our pleasure.

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