By his own admission, Adam Hollier is not the guy you want to have a beer with.
“Remember when George W. Bush was running and they said, ‘He’s the guy you want to have a beer with?'” he told me, explaining his personality. “No one wants to drink beer with me.”
Why not, I asked?
“I’m not funny,” he said. “I’m the friend you call to move a heavy couch. I’m the friend you call when you’re stuck on the side of the road. right For example, I’m the friend you call when you need a certain 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 being only 5-foot-9. After an AmeriCorps fellowship, he earned a degree in urban planning from the University of Michigan.
Hollier’s brother, who is 11 years older, is 6-foot-5. His oldest sister is a federal investigator with the U.S. Postal Service who went to the University of Michigan on a basketball and water polo scholarship.
“I grew up in a family of talents. And I don’t really have much of it,” Hollier said with self-concealing modesty. “My little sister is an amazing musician and singer and, you know, she’s done all those things. I can barely clap in time.”
Hollier is running — when I spoke with him, he was literally running to drop his daughters off at daycare — to replace Congresswoman Brenda Lawrence, a four-term congresswoman who announced her retirement earlier this year.
Her district, before a nonpartisan commission redrew boundaries widely seen as unfairly tilted toward Republicans, was one of the nation’s most heavily gerrymandered, a salamander-like strip of land that wound from Pontiac northwest through north Detroit to the upscale suburb of Grosse Pointe on Lake St. Clair, then south downriver to River Rouge and Dearborn.
Defying the odds, Hollier racked up endorsement after endorsement by doing what he’s always done—one-upping everyone else.
Lawrence initially endorsed Portia Roberson, an attorney 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 run by Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, endorsed Hollier instead.
In late June, Mike Duggan, the city’s mayor, did the same. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, his parent and a newfound political celebrity, endorsed him in May. A video announcing her endorsement showed Hollier wearing a neon vest and pushing a double jogging stroller.
Hollier’s primary opponent in the Democratic primary, Sri Thanedar, is a self-funded state lawmaker who previously ran for governor in 2018 and is third in the party’s primary behind Gretchen Whitmer and Abdul El-Sayed . His autobiography, The Blue Suitcase: Tragedy and Triumph in the Life of an Immigrant, originally written in Marathi, tells the story of his rise from a lower-class background in India to his success as an entrepreneur in the United States.
A former wealthy engineer, Thanedar now owns Avomeen 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 worried about his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict backed Hollier, as did veterans groups and two super PACs backed by cryptocurrency donors. Outside spending allowed Hollier to offset Thanedar’s spending on television ads, which was less than his own.
A firefighter’s son who couldn’t become a firefighter
The son of a social worker and firefighter, Hollier remembers his father sitting him down when he was 8 and telling him he should never follow in his footsteps.
Asked why, his father replied, “You have not a little healthy fear that brings you home at night.”
The comment stunned the young 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, as his personal superhero.
“And it’s a strange experience,” Hollier said. “Because, you know, nothing beats firefighters on Career Day except astronauts. Every child’s father is his hero, but my father is, you know, objectively”—objectively, he said again, 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 meant 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 picture to get a more accurate idea of the size of the crowd.
His parents “weren’t political at all,” he said — he notes that when Martin Luther King Jr. visited Detroit just before his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, his father went to a baseball game instead.
Years later, Hollier admitted sheepishly that he did rebel against his father — by becoming a volunteer firefighter in college.
Hollier says he’s most proud of his efforts to save jobs in his district after General Motors closed a plant in Hamtramck just after he took office in the state Senate. Credit… Emily Elkonin for The New York Times
Early interest in politics
Hollier was very much a political animal from an early age, he admitted.
“I know it’s fashionable for people to say they never thought they’d run, but I always knew I was, didn’t I?” he said. “It’s like I’ve always been in this thing.”
That same day in Washington, for example, he met Dennis Archer, Detroit’s mayor at the time, who told him he should “think about doing what I’m doing” someday—an intoxicating experience for a 10-year-old. He took the advice to heart and won his first race for high school student council president.
Hollier’s first official job in politics was in 2004, working as an aide to Buzz Thomas, a now-retired state senator whom he considered a political mentor. Hollier lost a House race in 2014 to then-incumbent Rose Mary Robinson. In 2018, he was elected to the State Senate, where he worked on auto insurance overhaul and lead pipe removal.
But the accomplishment he’s most proud of, he said, is the fight to keep jobs in his area after General Motors closed a plant in Hamtramck right 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 most important items on Archer’s list was to track down former senator Carl Levin, a longtime union friend who had recently retired and whom he had never met.
Don’t assume GM will close the plant, Levin told him when they talked.
“They’re not going to make the vehicles they’re making over there right now,” Hollier recounted Levin 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 facility is now known as Factory Zero, the company’s first plant dedicated entirely to electric vehicles.
Motivations and stages
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 launches into a passionate speech about how important it is for black Americans, and young black men in particular, to have positive role models. I suspect he has been giving some version throughout his life in politics.
Growing up in north Detroit, Hollier often bumped into his own representative, John Conyers, the longest-serving African-American in Congress. Connors, who died in 2019 at the age of 90, was known for touring every nook and cranny of his district.
But when Hollier knocked on his first door when he first ran for office, the woman who opened the door asked him, “Are you going to let me down like Kwame?” — a reference to Kwame Kilpatrick, the disgraced former mayor of Detroit.
This experience sobered him up to run for office as a black man in Detroit, a highly segregated city where black men are disproportionately likely to be out of work or in prison. But it also motivates him to prove the woman wrong.
On his 25th birthday, Hollier remembered going to get food from a store near his parents’ house. Notified of the milestone, the man behind the counter replied, “Congratulations. Not everyone makes it.”
With just one day left before the primary, Hollier spent 760 hours soliciting donations by phone, raising more than $1 million. His campaign says it has made 300,000 phone calls and knocked on 40,000 doors — double, he told me proudly, what Rep. Rashida Tlaib managed to do in the neighboring district.
But when I asked him if he would be calm if he lost, he admitted: “It’s difficult.”
He paused for a moment, then said, “I feel strongly that I did all I could do.”
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