ANNAPOLIS, MD—During an appearance on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ Governor Larry Hogan today discussed Maryland’s response to the COVID-19 Omicron surge and the current state of the Republican Party in America.
On COVID-19 in Maryland:
“We’re doing much, much better than we were just a couple of weeks ago with the Omicron surge that spiked in our state and everywhere else across the country, but we took a lot of steps to try to turn that around, and now we have the largest drop in hospitalizations of all 50 states.
“We have the lowest case rate in America, out of every state in the country, and so it’s very encouraging, but it’s not behind us. We’re heading in the right direction, and we’re not going to quit the fight, but it’s looking much much better than when we were having really serious runs on our hospitals and overloading our health care workers and too many people getting sick. So we’re trending in the right direction.
“We’d reached almost the peak of the entire crisis, but our state is one of the most vaccinated in America. We’re 94.4% vaccinated with at least one dose, and we’re the 5th best in the country with respect to mask compliance without a statewide mask mandate, but people are just doing the right thing and following the very clear advice that we’ve been giving for the past two years.”
On why Republican governors are succeeding in blue states:
“Successful politics is about addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division, and so we’ve been able to win in a blue state by appealing not only to the Republican base, but to Independents and suburban women and getting 35% of the Black vote, by winning Asians and Hispanics. That’s a formula for success nationwide.
“Donald Trump’s formula was we lost the White House, we lost the Senate, we lost the House, we lost governors, and we lost state legislative bodies. It’s not a winning formula by shrinking the base and shrinking the tent.”
On COVID-19 in Maryland:
“We’re doing much, much better than we were just a couple of weeks ago with the Omicron surge that spiked in our state and everywhere else across the country, but we took a lot of steps to try to turn that around, and now we have the largest drop in hospitalizations of all 50 states.
“We have the lowest case rate in America, out of every state in the country, and so it’s very encouraging, but it’s not behind us. We’re heading in the right direction, and we’re not going to quit the fight, but it’s looking much much better than when we were having really serious runs on our hospitals and overloading our health care workers and too many people getting sick. So we’re trending in the right direction.
“We’d reached almost the peak of the entire crisis, but our state is one of the most vaccinated in America. We’re 94.4% vaccinated with at least one dose, and we’re the 5th best in the country with respect to mask compliance without a statewide mask mandate, but people are just doing the right thing and following the very clear advice that we’ve been giving for the past two years.”
On why Republican governors are succeeding in blue states:
“Successful politics is about addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division, and so we’ve been able to win in a blue state by appealing not only to the Republican base, but to Independents and suburban women and getting 35% of the Black vote, by winning Asians and Hispanics. That’s a formula for success nationwide.
“Donald Trump’s formula was we lost the White House, we lost the Senate, we lost the House, we lost governors, and we lost state legislative bodies. It’s not a winning formula by shrinking the base and shrinking the tent.”
-###-
