Early on in the Senate race, there were signs Republicans might have a shot here. The GOP hasn’t won a Senate seat in Michigan since 1994, but the party controls the governorship and both houses of the legislature. The party's Senate candidate, Terri Lynn Land, led Peters in several early polls. A 56-year-old former two-time secretary of state, she had twice been elected statewide by large margins, whereas Peters was relatively unknown outside his suburban Detroit district. She was unopposed in the primary and had a substantial family fortune to boost her ample fundraising. Republicans championed Land, along with Iowa Senate nominee Joni Ernst, as walking refutations of Democrats’ contention that the GOP is unfriendly to women.

And yet recent evidence suggests the state is slipping away from the GOP. Peters has held a consistent lead in polls taken in the last month. Last week, the independent-expenditure arm of the National Republican Senatorial Committee canceled the nearly $1 million worth of Michigan television time it had reserved for the last two weeks of the race, a move widely interpreted as a white flag. Land, when I spoke to her, insisted she was still in the hunt, pointing to the more than $20 million outside groups on both sides have poured into the race as proof of its competitive nature. “We always knew this was going to be a tough race from the beginning,” she said. Her campaign insists the NRSC pulled out only because other outside groups agreed to pick up the slack—chiefly the Ending Spending Action Fund, the conservative super PAC backed by Chicago billionaire Joe Ricketts that has spent more on the Michigan race than any other outside entity.

Bolstered by such spending and Obama’s sagging popularity, Republican candidates have remained competitive in other blue states. If they’ve missed an opportunity in Michigan, most blame Land, whose candidacy has ranged from awkward to bizarre. Two early missteps stand out. First, for her first ad, she faced the camera and said, “Congressman Gary Peters and his buddies want you to believe I’m waging a war on women. Really? Think about that for a moment.” Then there are 12 seconds of silence as Land sips from a coffee mug, shakes her head, and looks at her watch. Republican pollster Frank Luntz called it the worst ad of the year.

A few weeks later, when Land faced the press at a Chamber of Commerce conference, she froze up in the face of questions. Pushing away the microphones aimed in her direction, she said, “I can’t do this,” and fled. It’s a single substanceless gaffe from several months ago, but it has come to symbolize Land’s campaign, in part because she hasn’t given the media much else to report. Since that appearance, she has largely avoided the press and the public, relying instead on a heavy volume of television ads to get her message out. Unusually for a campaign underdog, Land has turned down several opportunities to debate Peters. “If you are a U.S. Senate candidate from Michigan, you should be able to stand in front of a crowd of citizens from this state and answer questions that are on their minds,” Peters told me. “She’s been unwilling to do that.”