The hopes and dreams of Republicans opposed to Donald Trump took a heavy blow on Saturday, as Maryland governor Larry Hogan said he would not run against the president for the party’s nomination.

“I’m not going to be a candidate for president in 2020,” Hogan told the Washington Post.

Courted by conservatives opposed to the president, Hogan, 63, flirted with a challenge to Trump, speaking in early voting states and seemingly seeking to bait the notoriously volatile president. In February, he criticised the Republican National Committee for, he said, shielding Trump from a primary challenge.

But, he told the Post, he has now decided he has “a commitment to the 6m people of Maryland and a lot of work to do, things we haven’t completed”.

Hogan also told the paper he wanted to focus on his role with the National Governors Association, a bipartisan group which he will chair beginning in July.

“We need to have a bigger tent and find a way to get things done,” he said. “We need some civility and bipartisanship. Our politics are broken. Washington is broken. But we have a story to tell.”

Hogan, who was treated for cancer while in office, has been elected twice in a solidly Democratic state. The only Republican with a national profile who is set to challenge Trump in 2020 is Bill Weld, a former governor of another blue state, Massachusetts.

In March, Weld told the Guardian: “My hope is that the Republican party – the party of Abraham Lincoln, which appeals to the better angels of our nature, rather than sows division in the ranks – will regain ascendancy. To my eye, Trump has set out to take actions antagonistic to the interests of the United States: he’s doing it all wrong.”

Weld ran for the White House in 2016, with Gary Johnson of New Mexico on the Libertarian ticket. In an election in which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots, Johnson and Weld attracted nearly 4.5 million supporters.

Hogan told the Post he would not mount a third-party run. Nor did he commit to supporting Weld, saying the former governor “did call me before he announced and we had a nice conversation”.

He added: “I have a lot of respect for him and John Kasich and a lot of these other folks.”

Kasich, a former Ohio governor who ran for the nomination in 2016, told CNN on Friday he didn’t see another run when “90% of the Republican party supports” Trump.

Hogan said he had consulted his wife and children, the former counselling against a run though the children were “excited”.

Hogan’s father, Lawrence Hogan Sr, was a Republican congressman who played a leading role in calling for Richard Nixon to be impeached over the Watergate scandal.

The governor said he thought “dad would be very proud of me, in terms of what we have been able to accomplish as governor of Maryland. But I think he probably would be, if he were here, on the side of lobbying me to run.”

Hogan told the Post he did not agree with Justin Amash of Michigan, the only Republican in Congress to call for Trump’s impeachment over evidence of attempts to obstruct justice laid out by special counsel Robert Mueller in his report on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.

Hogan did not rule out a run for the White House in future.

“I believe there’s going to be a future in the Republican party beyond President Trump,” he said. “It’s either going to be next year or four years later. But at some point we’re going to be looking for what the future is going to be like.”