By his own admission, Adam Hollier is not the kind of person you want to have a beer with.
“Do you remember when George W. Bush would show up and they’d say, ‘Is he the kind of person you want to have a beer with?'” he told me, by way of explaining his personality. “No one wants to have a beer with me.”
Why not, I asked?
“I’m not funny,” he said. “I’m the friend you call to move a heavy sofa. I’m the friend you call when you’re stuck on the side of the road. Right? Like, I’m the friend you call when you need a designated driver” .
He repeated it again, in case I didn’t get it the first time, “I’m not funny.”
Hollier, 36, a Democratic candidate for a House seat in Michigan’s recently redrawn 13th Congressional District, which includes Detroit and Hamtramck, is a whirlwind of perpetual motion. A captain and paratrooper in the Army Reserves, he ran track and played safety at Cornell University despite standing just 5-foot-9. After a fellowship with AmeriCorps, he earned a graduate degree in urban planning at the University of Michigan.
Hollier’s brother, who is 11 years older, is 6-foot-5. Her older sister is a federal investigator for the US Postal Service who went to the University of Michigan on a basketball and water polo scholarship.
“I grew up in a house of talent. And I don’t really have much,” Hollier said with modest modesty. “My little sister is an amazing musician and singer and, you know, she’s done all these things. I can barely clap my hands.”
Hollier is running — when I spoke to him, he was literally dropping his daughters off at daycare — to replace Rep. Brenda Lawrence, a four-term congresswoman who announced her retirement earlier this year.
His district, before a nonpartisan commission redrawn boundaries that were seen as unfairly tilted toward Republicans, was one of the hardest-hit in the country, a salamander-like strip of land that snaked from Pontiac in the northwest to north of Detroit to the exclusive. suburb of grosse pointe on lake st. Clair, then south downriver to the Rouge River and Dearborn.
Defying the odds, Hollier has amassed endorsement after endorsement by doing what he’s always done: outworking everyone else.
Lawrence initially endorsed Portia Roberson, a Detroit attorney and nonprofit leader, but she has failed to gain traction. In March, the Legacy Committee for Unified Leadership, a local coalition of black leaders led by Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, endorsed Hollier.
In late June, so did Mike Duggan, the city’s mayor. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a father and recent political celebrity, endorsed him in May. A video announcing her support shows Hollier wearing a neon vest and pushing a double jogging stroller.
Hollier’s primary opponent in the Democratic primary, Shri Thanedar, is a self-funded state lawmaker who previously ran for governor in 2018 and placed third in the party’s primary behind Gretchen Whitmer and Abdul El-Sayed. His autobiography, “The Blue Suitcase: Tragedy and Triumph in an Immigrant’s Life,” originally written in Marathi, tells the story of his rise from lower-class origins in India to success as a businessman in the United States.
Thanedar, a wealthy former engineer, now owns Avomeen Analytical Services, a chemical testing laboratory in Ann Arbor. So far, he has spent at least $8 million of his own money on the race, according to campaign finance reports.
Pro-Israel groups, concerned about their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have backed Hollier, as have veterans groups and two super PACs backed by cryptocurrency donors. The foreign spend has allowed Hollier to offset Thanedar’s advertising spend, which dwarfs his own.
Son of a firefighter who couldn’t be a firefighter
The son of a social worker and a firefighter, Hollier remembers his father sitting him down when he was 8 and telling him he should never follow in his footsteps.
When asked why, his father replied, “You don’t have that healthy bit of fear that brings you home at night.”
The comment shocked the younger Hollier, who still considers his father, who led the Detroit Fire Department’s hazardous materials response team and retired as a captain after serving on the force for nearly 30 years, your own personal superhero.
“And that’s a strange experience,” Hollier said. “Because, you know, on Career Day, nothing beats the fireman, except the astronaut. Every kid’s dad is his hero, but my dad is, you know, objectively”—objectively, he returned that is, emphasizing the word—”in this space.”
When he was 10 years old, in 1995, he convinced his father to take him to the Million Man March on Washington, a gathering on the National Mall that aimed to highlight the challenges of growing up black and male in America. They went to the top of the Washington Monument, where young Adam insisted on taking a photograph to get a more accurate idea of the size of the crowd.
His parents weren’t political “at all,” he said, noting that when Martin Luther King Jr. visited Detroit just before his famous “I have a dream” speech, his father went to a baseball game.
Years later, Hollier sheepishly admitted that he rebelled against his father, becoming a volunteer firefighter in college.
Hollier says he’s proud to have fought to save jobs in his district after General Motors closed a plant in Hamtramck right after he took office in the state Senate. Credit…Emily Elconin for The New York Times
Early interest in politics
Hollier was very much a political animal from a young age, he admitted.
“I know it’s trendy for people to say they never thought they’d run for office, but I always knew I was, right?” he said “Like, I was always involved in the thing.”
That same day in Washington, for example, he met Dennis Archer, the mayor of Detroit at the time, who told him that someday he should “think about doing what I’m doing,” an intoxicating experience for a boy. of 10 years He took the advice to heart and won his first run for student council president in high school.
Hollier’s first official job in politics was in 2004, working as an aide to Buzz Thomas, a now-retired state senator he considers his political mentor. Hollier lost a state House race in 2014 to incumbent Rose Mary Robinson. In 2018, he was elected to the State Senate, where he worked on an overhaul of auto insurance and the elimination of lead pipes.
But the accomplishment he’s most proud of, he said, is fighting to save jobs in his district after General Motors closed a plant in Hamtramck just after he took office. In a panic, he called Archer, who gave him a list of 10 things to do immediately.
One of the main items on Archer’s list was to track down former Senator Carl Levin, a longtime friend of the unions who had recently retired and whom he had never met.
Don’t agree to GM closing the plant, Levin told him when they spoke.
“They’re not going to produce the vehicles they’re producing there right now,” Hollier recounted Levin as saying. “But you’re fighting for the next product line.”
Hollier took that advice to heart and worked with a coalition of others to steer GM toward a different solution. The site is now known as Factory Zero, the company’s first plant dedicated entirely to electric vehicles.
Motivations and milestones
If Hollier loses, Michigan will likely have no black members of Congress for the first time in seven decades.
When I ask him what that means to him, he jumps into an impassioned speech about how important it is for black Americans, and black youth in particular, to have positive role models. I suspect that he has been giving some version of himself all his life in politics.
Growing up north of Detroit, Hollier often ran into his own representative, John Conyers, the longest-serving African-American member of Congress. Conyers, who died in 2019 at the age of 90, was known for walking all corners of his district.
But when Hollier knocked on his first door the first time he ran for office, the woman who answered it asked him, “Are you going to disappoint me like Kwame?” — a reference to Kwame Kilpatrick, the disgraced former mayor of Detroit.
That experience sobered him up when he ran for office as a black man in Detroit, a highly segregated city where black men are disproportionately likely to end up out of a job or in prison. But it also motivated him to prove the woman wrong.
On her 25th birthday, Hollier remembered going to pick up food at a store near her parents’ house. When told of the milestone, the man behind the counter replied, “Congratulations. Not everyone makes it.”
With just one day until the primary, Hollier has spent 760 hours soliciting donations by phone, raising more than $1 million. His campaign says he’s made 300,000 phone calls and knocked on 40,000 doors, double, he tells me proudly, what Rep. Rashida Tlaib was able to do in the district next door.
But when I asked him if he would be at peace if he lost, he confessed, “That’s hard.”
He paused for a moment and then said, “I feel strongly that I have done all that I could have done.”
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