Gary Peters is tasked with defending a brutal Senate map for Dems. Then he wants to ‘work and ride motorcycles.’

AUBURN HILLS, Michigan — Gary Peters is stressed out. In fact, the Michigan Democrat tasked with defending a brutal Senate map this year said things were so bad he had just come from a meeting with his therapist.

“Dr. Davidson,” said Peters over a recent lunch at a Mexican restaurant here. “Dr. Harley Davidson,” he added, dry as the tortilla chips sitting in front of him.

The motorcycle-riding, dad-joke delivering chair of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm finds himself at a tense moment. For the second time, his colleagues have tasked him with running the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, after he helped the party hold onto seats in Arizona and Nevada — and improbably, the chamber majority — in 2022. Now, he must defend 23 Senate seats — including those held by endangered Democrats Sen. Jon Tester of Montana and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, while going after longshot pickup opportunities in Florida and Texas, where he has made moves in recent days to pick off Sens. Rick Scott and Ted Cruz .

Can this mild-mannered Michigander who spends more time riding his motorcycle and working on wonky Senate bills than in cable news green rooms survive in this age of slash and burn politics in the Trump era? And can he help keep Democrats from losing control of the Senate in November?

“When you think of the incentive structure right now to get your name out, it’s about people who want to throw rocks and create controversy,” said Peters, a few days after peeling off some 800 miles around Michigan visiting constituents on his Harley Davidson Pan America. “People who work and toil away to pass common sense, good, bipartisan legislation that actually helps people's lives? That doesn't get press.”

The rap on Peters is that he is boring — or, perhaps worse, naive. Back in August, Peters had to have a reporter explain to him the provenance of Tim Walz’s unfounded couch joke at JD Vance ’s expense, as a mortified aide picked at her food nearby. (“Oh my God,” he said, adding: “I don’t think we should ever do that.”)

And Peters is so little known nationally that the political and comms shop of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the past took to taunting him as "Jerry.” He is the kind of Democrat who merited a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but one that was just three minutes and two seconds long.

“You can picture him cheering you on outside of your T-ball game the same way he cheers on adults running for Senate,” said Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who met Peters for the first time at a fundraiser, where he quickly encouraged her to run for her current legislative seat.

Still, in a year for Democrats defined by Big Dad Energy, Peters may have the most of it. The former Eagle Scout and father of three is a former financial adviser who once helped parents optimize their college savings strategies. Now, Peters creates points-based competitions for Democratic senators making fundraising calls, and then doles out gift baskets stocked with wine, cheese, cookies and crackers to the winners.

“It's the smallest, silliest thing you could possibly imagine,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who has helped him with his chair duties this cycle and is eyeing succeeding him as chair . “But it works on people like me, who was like the number one Girl Scout Cookie seller when I was 10 years old.”

Before Harris picked Walz to be her running mate, Peters’ fellow Michigan Democrats floated his name to run alongside his former seatmate in the Senate, with whom he once visited with samples of Michigan whiskey which they sipped on his balcony. “To this day I don’t know if she really likes it,” he said .

His backstory shares some elements to Tim Walz.

A former lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve, his mother survived Nazi occupation of France and met his father while he served in World War II, and she later helped organize her workplace and became an SEIU union steward. Peters has gone on to win five House and Senate races himself, and overcame $40 million in outside GOP spending against him in 2020.

His brand in Michigan was so strong he outran Biden by two or more points in the Detroit suburbs, Genesee County around Flint, Saginaw, Bay and Jackson Counties. In a year with key races in the upper Midwest, he is the first senator from the region to run the committee since Bob Kerrey of Nebraska in the 1990s.

All of that helps him understand “red and purple places,” Gillibrand said.

Peters has his own experience with one of the biggest issues of the election, becoming the first senator to share his family’s abortion story during his 2020 race.

“It’s still powerful,” Peters said of the issue’s potency. “If you talk about Donald Trump, the reason we are where we are with the Dobbs decision and overturning Roe v. Wade was because of Donald Trump. He bears all the responsibility for it. He put those members on the Supreme Court. It was part of their litmus test. It was a plan to overturn it.”

But Peters was always a longshot. And though Harris called him in the two hours after the news Biden would end his campaign broke, she didn’t pick him.

“I don't want to get into any of that,” he said. “I just want to respect her process.”

Now, Peters is choosing which state’s Senate races to invest in with the approach of a financial planner picking a mutual fund.

“He's a guy who doesn't get a lot of limelight, doesn't do all the cable news and stuff, but he's built a team at the Senatorial Committee and helped raise the resources to get the job done,” said Jeff Timmer, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and the former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party.

Of whether recent investments in Texas’ and Florida’s Senate races are concessions that Ohio and Montana are slipping away, Peters said “not at all,” praised his candidates’ “quality” and said he sees “a real opportunity to go on offense.”

“I feel very comfortable making investments now in both Texas and Florida,” Peters said. “If you look at the polling, candidates are in the margin of error, and at the high end of margin error, we've got some public polls where Colin Allred is ahead, for example. But just look at the dynamics happening in those states, I feel very good about where we are. The abortion issue is playing big in both states, particularly Florida, with the referendum that's on the ballot.”

In Ohio, where Sherrod Brown, his colleague from the neighboring south who first broached the idea of him running the DSCC after his 2020 victory, is facing a late push from the car dealer Bernie Moreno, Peters said he feels “good.”

“We always anticipated these would be close races, and they are, and the numbers are where we anticipated them to be, and we're just executing our plan,” Peters said.

And then there’s his home state of Michigan, where surveys have Harris up over Donald Trump — but within the margin of error. There, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), the Senate candidate, has warned donors that Harris is “ underwater .” Asked what he made of that revelation, Peters cut the sunny talk.

“We know Michigan will be a close race,” Peters said. “This is a battleground state, so it's going to be close, and we just got to keep executing our plan and run through the tape.”

If Peters pulls off a defense of the Senate, a difficult task that seems increasingly unlikely — but one in which he has forced Republicans to spend money in Florida and Texas — he will step down from the campaign post satisfied.

Said Peters, “I just put my head down and work and ride motorcycles.”