Primary Elections: Live updates on key races

“You remember when George W. Bush was running, ‘Is he the kind of guy you want to have a beer with?'” he told me, explaining his personality. “Nobody wanted to have a beer with me.”

Why not, I asked?

“I’m not kidding,” he said. “I’m the friend you call to move a heavy bed. I’m the friend you call when you’re stuck on the side of the road. Right? I’m the friend you call when you need a designated driver.

If I didn’t get it the first time, he repeated it: “I’m not funny.”

Hollier, 36, a Democratic candidate for a House seat in Michigan’s newly 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 being 5-foot-9. After a fellowship with AmeriCorps, he earned a graduate degree in urban planning from the University of Michigan.

Hollier’s brother, 11 years older, is 6-foot-5. Her older sister, who attended the University of Michigan on a basketball and water polo scholarship, is a federal investigator for the United States Postal Service.

“I grew up in a gifted home. And I don’t have much of it,” said Hollier with self-deprecation. “My little sister is an incredible musician and singer, you know, has done all these things. I can’t help but clap when she hits.

Hollier is running — when I spoke with her, she said she was doing so to drop off her daughters at day care — for Rep. Brenda Lawrence, a four-term congresswoman who announced her retirement earlier this year.

His district was one of the most heavily gerrymandered in the nation, snaking upstate from Pontiac in the northwest to across northern Detroit, before redrawing boundaries that were widely seen as disproportionately tilted toward Republicans. A suburb of Grosse Pointe on Lake St. Clair, then south downriver toward the Rouge and Dearborn Rivers.

Defying the odds, Hollier has earned endorsement after endorsement by doing what she always did — outdoing everyone else.

Initially, Lawrence endorsed Portia Roberson, a lawyer and nonprofit leader from Detroit, but she 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, supported Hollier instead.

At the end of June, So did the city’s mayor, Mike Duggan. State Senator Mallory McMorrow, a fellow parent and A The new political popularity, May supported him. A video announcing her endorsement shows Hollier wearing a neon vest and pushing a double jogging stroller.

Hollier’s main opponent in the Democratic primary is Sri Thanedar, a self-funded state lawmaker who previously ran for governor in 2018 and finished third in the party’s primary behind Gretchen Whitmer and Abdul El-Sayed. His biography, “The Blue Suitcase: Tragedy and Triumph in the Lives of Immigrants” Originally written in Marathi, it tells the story of his rise to success as a businessman in America from a low-caste background in India.

A wealthy former engineer, Thanedar now owns Avomine Analytical Services, a chemical testing laboratory in Ann Arbor. He has spent at least $8 million of his own money on the race so far, according to campaign finance reports.

Pro-Israel groups, concerned about his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have backed Hollier, as have veterans groups and two super PACs backed by cryptocurrency donors. The outside spending has allowed Hollier to cover Thanedar’s television advertising costs, reducing his own costs.

A fireman’s son cannot become a fireman

Hollier, the son of a social worker and a firefighter, remembers his father sitting him down when he was 8 and telling him to never follow in his footsteps.

Asked why, he replied, “You don’t have a healthy fear that brings you home at night.”

The comment stunned the young Hollier, who views his father, who ran the Detroit Fire Department’s hazardous material response team and retired as a captain after nearly 30 years on the force, as his personal superhero.

“That was a different experience,” Hollier said. “Because, you know, on Career Day, nothing beats a firefighter except an astronaut. Every kid’s dad is their hero, but my dad, you know, objectively” — ObjectivelyHe repeated with emphasis on the word “at that place.”

When he was 10 years old, he convinced his father to take him to the Million Man March on Washington in 1995, a rally on the National Mall aimed at highlighting the challenges of being black and male in America. They went to the top of the Washington Monument, where young Adam insisted on taking a photo to get a more accurate sense of the size of the crowd.

He said his parents weren’t “all that” political — he notes that when Martin Luther King Jr. visited Detroit shortly before his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, his father went to a baseball game instead.

Years later, Hollier sheepishly admits, he rebelled against his father — becoming a volunteer firefighter in college.

Early interest in politics

Hollier was a political animal from an early age, he admits.

“I know it’s common to say they never thought they’d run for office, but I always knew I was, right?” he said. “I was always involved.”

For example, on the same day in Washington, he met Dennis Archer, then mayor of Detroit, who told him that someday he would “think about what I’m doing”—a difficult experience for a 10-year-old. Winning his first race for student council president in high school, he took the advice to heart.

Hollier’s first official job in politics was in 2004, working as an aide to now-retired state senator Buzz Thomas, whom he considers his political mentor. Hollier lost a race for the state House in 2014 to then-incumbent Rose Marie Robinson. In 2018, he was elected to the state Senate, where he worked on auto insurance reform and lead pipeline elimination.

But the accomplishment he’s most proud of is his scrambling to save jobs in his district after General Motors closed a plant in Hamtramuck soon after he took office. In a panic, he called Archer, who gave him a list of 10 things he needed to do immediately.

One of the top items on Archer’s list was former senator Carl Levin, a longtime friend of labor unions who recently retired and whom he had never met.

Don’t accept that GM will close the plant, Levine told him as they talked.

“They’re not going to make the vehicles they’re making there now,” Hollier recounted Levine 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 Factory zeroThe company’s first plant was dedicated entirely to electric vehicles.

Motivations and milestones

If Hollier loses, Michigan will 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 emotional speech about how important it is for black Americans, especially young black men, to have positive role models. I suspect he has been giving some version of politics his whole life.

Growing up in North 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 90He was known for walking in every nook and cranny of his district.

But when Hollier knocked on his first door in his first run for office, the woman who answered it asked him, “Are you going to cheat on me like Guam?” she asked. – A hint Guam Kilpatrick, former mayor of Detroit.

That experience sobered him up about running for office as a black man in Detroit, a highly segregated city where black men are often unemployed or incarcerated. But it also motivated him to prove the woman wrong.

On her 25th birthday, Hollier remembers picking up some food from a store near her parents’ house. Told of the milestone, the man behind the counter replied: “Congratulations. Not everyone makes it. “

With the primary just a day away, Hollier has spent 760 hours soliciting donations by phone and raised more than $1 million. His campaign claims to have made 300,000 phone calls and 40,000 door knocks — double what, he proudly tells me, Rep. Rashida Tlaib was able to do in a neighboring district.

But when I asked him if he would be relieved if he lost, he admitted, “It’s a tough one.”

He paused for a moment and said, “I feel sure that I have done my best.”

What to study

• Republican missteps, weak candidates and fundraising woes present unexpected opportunities for Democrats in this year’s gubernatorial races. Jonathan Martin writes.

• Shira Frankel reports A potentially disruptive new movement: Parents who joined the anti-vaccination and anti-mask causes during the pandemic narrowed their political beliefs on those issues into a single-mindedness.

• Madison Underwood, a 22-year-old woman from Tennessee, was thrilled to find out she was pregnant. But when a rare defect in a developing fetus threatens her life, she is thrown into post-Roe chaos. Neelam Bohra has the story.

— Plague

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