Hill Harper Draws On Hollywood Support As He Faces A Daunting U.S. Senate Primary Race In Michigan Against Front Runner Elissa Slotkin

Ted Johnson
·8 min read
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Hill Harper, running for an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, returned to Los Angeles earlier this month, where the actor headlined a fundraiser co-hosted by John Legend, as well as other figures including Vivica A. Fox and Mike Tollin.

The event was a needed boost to the actor and activist’s campaign: In the Democratic primary race, Harper is facing Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who has a wide lead in polls and in her campaign war chest. She had more than $6 million cash on hand as of the end of last year, dwarfing that of her rivals. Harper had almost $150,000.

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Harper, best known for his roles in The Good Doctor and CSI:NY, is largely running to the left of Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, and obviously hoping for a breakthrough. He also has relayed what Barack Obama, a classmate at Harvard Law School, told him that as hard as acting and other professions are, “Politics is tough.”

In a recent interview with Deadline, Harper said of the former president’s comment, “It’s extremely difficult because of the way that the system has been built, and what I mean by that is, the sad irony of me running is that I believe that to save our democracy, we have to pull money out of politics and we need full campaign finance reform. But to get elected, to get money out of politics, I have to spend so much time raising money to even have a shot.”

Slotkin announced her bid shortly after Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) announced her retirement. Harper entered the race last summer, in an announcement video in which he positioned himself as an outsider. In the video, set up as if he was delivering a message to his son, Harper said that “at the core of too much of this are politicians in office that don’t really care about people.”

Harper was born in Iowa, went to Brown University and Harvard Law, and later lived in California. Seven years ago, he bought a coffee shop in Detroit, and later an historic home. His departure from The Good Doctor was recently addressed in the season 7 premiere.

Harper said that he landed in Michigan because both of his roommates from Harvard Law and the Kennedy School of Government were from the state, Harper said, and he worked on a few projects there when Michigan had a film tax incentive.

“I said to myself, ‘When I have children, I am going to raise them here because I want them to turn out like folks here more than any other place I have been,” he said. After he adopted his son in 2015, he got a place in Detroit the following year.

Harper was heavily engaged in Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential runs, and Obama appointed him to a presidential cancer panel. The actor wrote about his battle with thyroid cancer in the 2012 book The Wealth Cure: Putting Money In Its Place. Harper also is the author of other books including Letters to a Young Brother and Letters to a Young Sister, and is the founder of the Manifest Your Destiny Foundation.

Harper said, “As an actor, you have to walk in someone else’s shoes, and I think that part of the damage we see in today’s public discourse, and particularly in our federal representation — that is broken, to say the least, and so divisive — is that the level of empathy required, and the level of being able to attempt to understand someone else and empathize with them, has left politics. So from that standpoint, I think any lived experience helps someone be a better public representative.”

As prominent as Harper’s resume is, though, he still is not well known in the state, according to a recent Detroit News/WDIV poll. It showed him with a 14% name identification, to 45% for Slotkin. It is still early: The primary is more than five months away.

“There is time, but he had got to really start to build his name ID and introduce himself around Michigan,” said Dave Dulio, political science professor at Oakland University in Rochester, MI.

As a three-term congresswoman from a swing district, Slotkin “is a formidable campaigner and has won some incredibly tough races in the past several election cycles. She has proven that she can win a district that is maybe even unfavorable to her party,” Dulio said.

He said that it was “notable” that the United Auto Workers did not endorse in the Democratic primary, given Slotkin’s track record of union support. Their non-endorsement reflects a bit of split of support among its membership between Slotkin and Harper, according to the Detroit News.

“It is not insignificant,” Dulio said. “Is that going to vault him to the top of the polls? No.”

During the campaign Harper has highlighted his experience on the national board of SAG-AFTRA, and he was on the picket lines in New York and Los Angeles. He also said that he has been on the strike lines with the UAW, nurses and casino workers.

“If we are going to solve huge problems, that has to do with living wage, that has to do with health care, we’re going to have to do it collectively, and we are going to have to fight together, and I truly believe that when we fight together we win together, and that’s why supporting the labor movement is such a big part of my campaign,” he said.

Harper also has highlighted endorsements from figures included Smokey Robinson and civil rights attorney Ben Crump. In the entertainment industry, Harper’s donors include Wendell Pierce, Frank Marshall and Mellody Hobson. Slotkin, who has received endorsements from groups like Emily’s List and End Citizens United, also has drawn industry donors including Allison Janney, Damon Lindelof and Greg Daniels. Her campaign declined to comment on Harper’s Senate run.

Earlier this month, Harper was among the eight candidates that were the subject of U.S. Senate complaints brought by the Campaign Legal Center last week for incomplete or missing financial disclosure forms. The center’s complaint against Harper noted that he “did not report any earned income, even though he had a public role as a working actor and advertised multiple likely sources of income on his campaign website.” Harper did not comment on the complaint, but a campaign spokesperson has said that an updated disclosure with the Senate Ethics Committee would be filed by the end of this month. Dulio said that such complaints “almost never have any bearing on the final vote tally. It will be corrected and that is the end of it.”

Michigan’s presidential primary is on Tuesday, and it may give some indication of the impact of another issue that has been front and center nationally: The Israel-Hamas war. The state, with a heavy concentration of Arab-Americans in Dearborn and other areas of the state, is what The New York Times called the “first test” of whether President Joe Biden’s stance in support of Israel will hurt him. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has urged voters to cast their ballots for “uncommitted” next week.

Harper has called for a ceasefire, writing on his campaign website last month, “The time for action is now – not next week, next month, or next year. Let our call be clear and resounding: Stop the war. Protect the innocent. Pursue peace. Permanent ceasefire.”

Slotkin, the only Jewish member of Michigan’s congressional delegation, has not called for a ceasefire but was among a group of lawmakers who sent a letter to Biden in December critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military strategy in Gaza.

Harper recalled a trip he took to Israel as part of a State Department goodwill mission to meet with artists there, and “what became very clear to me is that both the Israelis and the Palestinians fundamentally want the same thing. They want a safe place to live, the ability to create and survive, a safe place for their kids to go to school and a place for their kids to learn and in peaceful coexistence. And it’s pretty clear that governmental and terrorist organizations have a different agenda.”

His campaign made headlines last November, when he said that on of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s largest donors called him and said that if he dropped out of the race and instead challenged Tlaib, he could count on $20 million in support. “I’m not just running for the title. I’m not going to run against the only Palestinian-American in Congress just because some special interests don’t like her,” Harper wrote on X/Twitter. AIPAC denied any involvement.

Harper later appeared on MSNBC’s ReidOut to point to the incident as an example of a campaign finance system where “money is used as the weapon.”

He also made that point to Deadline. “We are not so divided as we are disconnected, and I see that. I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that social media, and the political establishment of both parties, have a vested interest to create villains and create division. It goes back to our point about money in politics: If you can create a villain, a boogeyman, you can raise money off that.”

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