Steve Friess is a former Politico staff writer who now freelances from Ann Arbor, Mich. He tweets @SteveFriess.

JACKSON, Mich.—Everything Shri Thanedar said sounded great to the small crowd of die-hard lefties who spent the Friday night of Memorial Day weekend in this conservative, rural burg checking out the state’s hottest Democrat.

That may be because he earnestly agreed to somehow deliver whatever his listeners requested, if only they would help him upset the establishment, win the Democratic nomination and capture the governor’s seat in Lansing.


A school social worker called for a raise and more school psychiatric services. Thanedar agreed, then pivoted to assert that he opposes efforts to arm teachers. “Teachers are there to teach,” he declared to applause. An activist demanded he pledge that a first order of business as governor would be to add civil rights LGBTQ protections to the state’s anti-discrimination statute, and he readily made the vow. An employee of the nearby state prison complained about work conditions, giving Thanedar an opening to denounce the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

And when someone asked him what he thinks of Bernie Sanders, Thanedar was ready.

“Well, I am the only gubernatorial candidate that voted for Bernie Sanders,” he grinned. “I like Bernie. I went and saw him in Iowa when he was starting his presidential campaign. I stood in the back of him. I like Bernie. I call myself, though, a fiscally savvy Bernie. He had a lot of good ideas, but how are we going to pay for it? We need to find ways to pay for it.”

And in that answer is the peculiar spectacle of the Thanedar candidacy at work. He’s a 63-year-old millionaire chemist and entrepreneur who took advantage of the fact that only a few months ago, when he launched his quixotic, self-financed campaign for Michigan governor, he was utterly unknown. Upon that blank canvas, he’s spent $3 million and counting in TV ads to paint an image as a Sanders acolyte with big “progressive” ideas who disarms skeptics of his accent (Thanedar is an Indian immigrant) and his non-European name with endearing, self-effacing jokes.



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As a result, he now has higher name recognition than former state Senate Democratic Leader Gretchen Whitmer, the presumed Democratic front-runner. Since March, several polls have had him in a statistical tie with Whitmer—with the most recent giving Thanedar a 3-point lead. Thanedar has pledged $6 million of his own money to his campaign, which made a big splash with a debut TV commercial during this year’s Super Bowl. Until last week, with less than two months until the Aug. 7 primary, he was the only Democratic candidate to run TV ads.

Thanedar successfully packaged himself as a big-spending, soak-the-rich, free-everything-for-all Sanders devotee. But more significantly, he uses the word “progressive” as often as possible as a brand signifier to an electorate getting to know him for the first time.

“I’m a person who has lived a progressive life, who has strong progressive views,” Thanedar told the crowd in Jackson. “No other candidate has more progressive views than me.”

So why are so many Democrats anxious, angry and downright hostile to Shri Thanedar’s candidacy?

To many in Michigan, Thanedar’s explosive burst onto the political scene is a partisan mirror image of the trajectory of another oddly coiffed, thick-accented businessman-turned-politician. And as establishment Republicans in 2015 and 2016 did with Donald Trump, Democrats here question what Shri Thanedar really believes.

Shri Thanedar at a campaign rally in Jackson, Mich. | Michael Nemeth for Politico Magazine

As a candidate, Thanedar may support the full catechism of progressive priorities—universal child care and pre-K, criminal justice reform, marijuana legalization, and so on—but as a private citizen, he has a more mixed record.

In March 2008, he donated $2,300 to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign; he says he did so to attend an event and ask McCain a question about immigration policy. That same year, on the third page of his self-published memoir, The Blue Suitcase, Thanedar venerated Howard Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, as an exemplar of American individualism. More recently, C-SPAN footage unearthed by The Intercept shows Thanedar attending a 2016 campaign rally for then-GOP presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio, nodding and applauding the Florida senator’s conservative message and attacks on Hillary Clinton—and ultimately introducing himself to Rubio and asking for a photo.



A wealthy first-time candidate prone to lofty, unverifiable claims vaulting to the top of the polls in a high-profile race by wrapping himself in the cloak of a movement he had little connection to before his campaign launch?

For months, Democrats opposed to Thanedar’s candidacy have brushed off polls that show his campaign in first or second place, arguing that the numbers can’t stay that high, or that voters will come to their senses, or that a more mainstream choice will win. But now, with less than seven weeks left in the primary campaign and Thanedar still leading in most polls, his loss, once assumed, no longer seems like such an inevitability.

A wealthy first-time candidate prone to lofty, unverifiable claims vaulting to the top of the polls in a high-profile race by wrapping himself in the cloak of a movement he had little connection to before his campaign launch? Are Michigan Democrats, as Thanedar’s critics fear, about to be rocked by their own Bizarro-World Trump? Or is Shri Thanedar the man he says he is—one who has lived a rag-to-riches life and now wants to advance the most ambitious expansion of the American social safety net since the Great Society?



***

As any talented politician does, Thanedar tells his personal story whenever he gets the chance. He was born into abject poverty in Chikodi, India, in 1955, one of eight children in a Brahmin family where, because of their caste status, members weren’t supposed to engage in manual labor. His father worked as a court clerk, a job that paid a meager salary and forced the family to move frequently, hopping to whatever village he was stationed in.

“What I remember most are the everyday things, like going to the river for drinking water,” Thanedar wrote in The Blue Suitcase, an Indian best-seller when it was first published in the Marathi language in 2004 (Thanedar says he issued an English-language version in 2008 at the suggestion of former President Bill Clinton).

After his father was forced to retire, it fell to Shri to support his family financially, which he did by working as a janitor while enrolled at college. After earning his degree, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1979 to pursue a doctorate in chemistry at University of Akron in Ohio, graduating in 1982 and moving to Ann Arbor to conduct postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan. Two years later, Thanedar moved to St. Louis for a job with a specialty chemical company, received a green card, and got married to a woman from Mumbai named Shamal, with whom he would have two sons. In 1988, he became an American citizen, and in 1990, he bought Chemir, a small chemical testing and analysis laboratory in the St. Louis area.

Chemir’s revenues, just $150,000 in 1991, grew quickly as the company took on major clients, ranging from automotive suppliers to manufacturers of baby food. And while his professional life prospered, his family suffered a tragedy in October 1996, when Shamal, who struggled with depression, took her own life.

In the wake of his wife’s death, Thanedar withdrew from work to take care of his two young sons. “Loneliness swept over me again, a huge tide of loneliness,” he wrote in his memoir. He eventually found companionship in a woman named Shashi, whose husband died around the same time as Shamal. Shri and Shashi married in August 1999.

Through it all, Chemir flourished. By 2006, its revenues hit $16 million and the Thanedars were showing off their ostentatious $6.5 million mansion—with a 150-seat home theater—for an indulgent, gawky local TV news feature.

But those business fortunes vanished in the Great Recession, partly because of the economic downturn and partly because Thanedar overreached in borrowing $24 million to buy seven other labs. He declared bankruptcy, and the banks he owed money sold off his companies to cover his debt.

In 2010, he founded a new chemical testing lab, Avomeen, in Ann Arbor, where his sons were attending business school. Six years later, he sold his majority stake in the company to High Street Capital, a Chicago private equity firm, for about $20 million and began plotting his 2018 gubernatorial run.

It’s a classic rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches story, and as a candidate, Thanedar has claimed this financial resilience as an asset. But like Trump, he’s dogged by mockery of his experience with bankruptcy and an unflattering legal paper trail. In Thanedar’s case, he faces an ongoing federal lawsuit over whether he made “fraudulent and misleading claims” about the value of Avomeen in the runup to its sale, as well as attacks over whether he failed to properly care for more than 170 beagles and monkeys that’d been used for testing in his labs after his creditors forced the facility to shut down.

Thanedar hugs a supporter at the Jackson rally. | Michael Nemeth for Politico Magazine

Thanedar’s response is straight out of the Trump playbook: Deny everything, apologize for nothing, blame enemies and the media and keep on squeezing his branding—in this case, the word “progressive”—into as many sentences, signs and Google search ads as possible. He rejects every claim of wrongdoing, and insists they only surfaced after he began getting traction in the governor’s race.

“Progressives are having a hard time understanding that someone with wealth can be progressive,” Thanedar told Politico in an interview. “A lot of their concern stems from the fact that I’m a businessperson, so how can I be a progressive? And that’s where I’m seeing a lot of resistance from the establishment. They’re using every smear they can use to bring me down. But I am who I am.”

Perhaps the most notable example of the establishment’s resistance, at least in Thanedar’s eyes, come from allegations from four prominent Michigan political insiders—two Democratic strategists, a Republican strategist and the president of the state’s Small Business Association —who claim that in early 2017, as he first explored a possible bid, that he told them he didn’t know whether he should run as a Republican, a Democrat or an independent.



They’re using every smear they can use to bring me down. But I am who I am.”

Thanedar claims they are lying. And as for meeting with Republican strategists, Thanedar told Politico he specifically asked the public relations firm that handled the 2016 sale of Avomeen to arrange meetings with Democratic political consultants, and was surprised when one of them, Adrian Hemond, brought GOP colleagues to the meeting.

Hemond’s firm, Grassroots Midwest, bills itself prominently on its website as “Michigan’s first and only bipartisan grassroots advocacy firm.” In addition to Hemond, a Democrat, its staff includes co-founder and chairman Dan McMaster and research director Brian Began, among others. McMaster, the former director of the Michigan House Republican Campaign Committee, and Began, who led state Republican redistricting efforts following the 2010 census, are both prominent conservatives.

“I was only expecting to meet with Adrian, but he had these two other guys who specialize on Republican campaigns, and they all sat there and tried to convince me that I should run as a Republican because I’m a businessperson and Democrats would never accept a businessperson as their candidate,” Thanedar said. “I was not expecting to have three people in that meeting.”

Yet Politico has obtained emails from early 2017 between Thanedar’s camp and Grassroots Midwest that cast doubt on that notion.

On January 17, 2017, once the initial meeting was set, Thanedar’s publicist emailed Hemond to say that Thanedar was “interested in meeting your team as well.” Hemond replied to both the publicists and Thanedar that he planned to have Began and McMaster at the meeting.

On January 26, the day before the meeting, Thanedar personally emailed Hemond, Began and McMaster links to four stories about his business successes “as a way of introduction.”

Months later, as Thanedar prepared to announce his bid as a Democrat, he again personally emailed Hemond, Began and McMaster, inviting “all three of you” to his June 2017 campaign launch in Detroit.

Thanedar speaks to supporters in Jackson. | Michael Nemeth for Politico Magazine

“I’m surprised that he would be surprised that there would be Republicans in the room, because that’s our gig,” McMaster said in an interview. “We usually have people from both sides of our firm there, because we can tell you, ‘Well, the Democrats will do this to you,’ or ‘the Republicans will do this to you.’ He told us he didn’t know whether he was going to run as a Republican or a Democrat. I told him, ‘Your personal story is a Republican story.’”

Hemond and McMaster, Thanedar insists, are attacking him because he didn’t hire their firm. Yet both strategists say they told Thanedar they would not take on his campaign if he ran as a Democrat because he lacked party ties and was dismissive about the need to court Michigan’s powerful labor unions for votes, money and volunteers.

The consultants say they came away from their meeting unsure what Thanedar actually believed.

“We asked him about the abortion issue, and he said he was comfortable with whatever position he needed to adopt to get the best chance to win,” Hemond said. “He said the same thing about gun issues. The one place where he was a little evasive was the gay rights thing. I don’t know that there’s a significance to that. He just sort of dodged.”

Such accounts mesh with those of Democratic consultant Joe DiSano and Small Business Association President Rob Fowler, who, along with Hemond, first told The Intercept of their early dealings with Thanedar. Both described him as unsure of his own party affiliation and malleable about his political stances. DiSano told Politico about having to explain to Thanedar why winning an election as an independent is virtually impossible in a state where straight-ticket voting is so dominant.

And though Thanedar contests DiSano’s account of their meeting, what is not disputed are the donations and political actions Thanedar has made over the years, including donating the legal maximum of $2,300 to McCain’s presidential campaign in March 2008, and attending a 2016 rally for Rubio.

Thanedar is dismissive of these details, noting, accurately, that the vast majority of his political giving has been to Democratic candidates — including nearly $7,500 to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama since 2007, according to Federal Election Commission records. Like Trump, Thanedar says buttering up and donating to both sides is sometimes useful as a businessman. “I am a Democrat, I have always been a Democrat,” he groused to Politico. “This is all lies. You see how things get twisted, and now my opponents are using that to smear me.”



***

If the 2017 version of Thanedar was politically malleable, the 2018 incarnation is exquisitely disciplined and on-message as a Bernie-esque progressive. His platform is solidly pro-choice and supportive of LGBTQ rights, advocates for free college, a ban on charter schools, single-payer health care, a $15 minimum wage, prison reform, increased immigration and expanded early childhood education.

He’ll pay for it, he insists, by passing a constitutional amendment to replace the state’s flat personal income tax with a graduated one that hits the wealthy harder, and with the tax revenue surge expected if voters approve legalized recreational marijuana in a November referendum.

How will he achieve all of this in the face of a sclerotic and hyperpartisan state legislature overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans? Thanedar points to his success in business as proof of his own powers of persuasion. “Either you’re a good leader or you’re not a good leader,” he said. “You gotta make things happen.”

Thanedar’s presence in the race is problematic not only for presumed Democratic front-runner Whitmer, who must now spend more money and sooner to stave him off, but for former Detroit Health Commissioner Abdul El-Sayed, whose fiery liberal campaign captured the endorsement of the Michigan Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus. El-Sayed had expected to carry the Bernie mantle against Whitmer’s more establishment ties, but most of his firepower has instead been trained on blasting Thanedar as a “fake progressive.”

“You can call yourself an astronaut, [but that] doesn’t mean you’ve ever been to space,” El-Sayed campaign spokesman Adam Joseph told Politico in the campaign’s only comment for this report. The Whitmer campaign declined to comment for this story.



You can call yourself an astronaut, [but that] doesn’t mean you’ve ever been to space,” said El-Sayed campaign spokesman Adam Joseph.

Still, some in the Michigan political firmament are duly impressed by Thanedar’s life story and ability to overcome serious challenges. Longtime pundit Bill Ballenger, a former Republican state legislator and the publisher of the nonpartisan insider rag The Ballenger Report,has called Thanedar “a captivating candidate” and on a recent episode of his podcast, predicted that Thanedar could win. In an interview, Ballenger was dismissive of the chatter about Thanedar’s progressive bona fides.

“You have to take him at his word and believe that he believes what he’s saying right now and the way he’s talking right now unless you can find some real smoking gun indicating he’s a total phony and that he doesn’t really have any solid progressive underpinnings,” Ballenger said. “I must say, as every day goes by, it appears he’s doubled down on the progressive agenda. He’s really coming on like gangbusters.”

Others, however, see a more insidious effort afoot to Thanedar’s sudden emergence and thus far successful appropriation of the “progressive” label.

“There are so many different things that Shri and Donald Trump have in common,” said Kelly Collison, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party Progressive Caucus and herself a candidate for state representative in the Lansing area. “All the stuff that’s coming out about Shri’s businesses are troublesome. But the most frustrating part is that he can buy this ad space and say that he is … the only progressive, or whatever—which is complete bullshit. That terrifies me because so many people are so busy that they don’t have time do all the research, and it’s definitely possible he could buy this election.”

Left: An assortment of Shri campaign bumper stickers, pamphlets, business cards and copies of his autobiography on a table at the Jackson rally. Right: Thanedar gives a thumbs-up sign while talking to an attendee at his Jackson rally. | Michael Nemeth for Politico Magazine

At the Michigan Democratic Party convention on April 16, many members of Collison’s caucus were shocked when Thanedar attempted to snatch the microphone from her and then tried to talk over her at the caucus’ break-out meeting. A video of the awkward incident posted by Joseph on social media, predictably, went viral in Michigan’s political circles.

“Shri terrifies me; I don’t trust him,” Collison said. “I don’t know what he’s actually going to do. I don’t know what he really believes. It kind of seems like he’s just for what’s popular right now. For as much as he says he’s a Bernie guy, he’s spent way too much time swooning over Republicans. A lot of people voted for Bernie who were unexpected Bernie voters, that’s true. But what did he do for Bernie? He didn’t even donate to Bernie. I mean, you’re a millionaire and Bernie was obviously the underdog. If you supported him, why would you not donate to him?”

Beyond the worries over what Thanedar really believes is a more pragmatic fear among Democratic strategists: that he will eke past Whitmer and win the nomination, only to have his business record vivisected by the Republican candidate, expected to be either Attorney General Bill Schuette or Lt. Gov. Brian Calley.

“Schuette will carve Shri Thanedar up like a soft peanut,” DiSano said. The attorney general is a seasoned candidate known for his messaging discipline and attention to the nuts and bolts of campaigning. But Thanedar? “He is an egomaniac looking for attention,” said DiSano. “There’s no grand political strategy here, other than to get elected. There’s no ideology here. And if he gets the Democratic nomination, I’ll be the first person to lead the people to boycott the top of the ticket, because there’s no way he’s going to get elected governor. He would decimate Democrats from Menominee to Monroe.”



There’s no grand political strategy here, other than to get elected. There’s no ideology here,” said Democratic strategist Joe DiSano.

Thanedar chafes at those criticisms and rejects comparisons to the president. Trump “is not even an honest businessperson,” Thanedar told Politico. “He’s into himself, he’s a narcissist, possibly mentally unstable. He’s a person that is extremely bigoted, he is a person who is intolerant.”

He’s more comfortable being paired with Michigan Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, another Ann Arbor-based political neophyte who spent his own millions to successfully barge into his party’s primaries back in 2010. Snyder’s tenure was disastrous for the state, Thanedar said, but it showed what a wealthy outsider can do.

Still, Snyder at least was a lifelong Michigander with longstanding ties to his party, and ran on a platform that comported with his longtime opinions.

“Shri’s trying to sell himself as something that he’s pretty clearly not,” Hemond said. “The limits got pushed in 2016 with the Trump campaign. Now you’re going to see politicians testing that approach out to see if that works.”

For his part, Thanedar dares his naysayers to come at him with everything they’ve got.

“It’s the refusal to fear failure that keeps me going,” he wrote in a final passage of The Blue Suitcase that reads almost like a warning to the political establishment. “I succeeded not because I was a genius or brilliant at business but instead because I had confidence to think I could overcome any obstacle. As a result, the obstacles only made me try harder. And now I’m grateful to everyone who tried to stop me.”