Peters is campaigning like a man with nothing – or everything – to lose. | Manu Raju/POLITICO Senate battle in Michigan

Part of an occasional series on the hottest races of the 2014 midterm election.

MARQUETTE, Mich. — Braving sub-zero temperatures at the annual dog sled race here, Democratic Senate candidate Gary Peters happily indulged when a prospective voter offered him a swig from her flask of whiskey. And as some Upper Peninsula locals (known as “Yoopers”) were sledding down a giant snowbank the next day in nearby Houghton, the three-term congressman borrowed a sled and barreled down the hill himself, even though his attire was more suited for a boardroom than the playground.


“I’ll admit, I haven’t done that in a while,” said Peters, 55, a bespectacled former college professor and onetime state senator who worked in the financial sector for two decades.

Peters is campaigning like a man with nothing — or perhaps, everything — to lose.

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His dead-of-winter barnstorming in a region with a mere 3 percent of the state’s population shows how critical Michigan has become in the battle for control of the Senate — and the lengths to which Democrats will go to turn out voters without a presidential election to spur them to the polls.

In their quest to capture the six seats needed to take control of the Senate, Republicans are looking beyond conservative strongholds like Arkansas, Louisiana and Alaska to states that Barack Obama carried in 2012. Michigan has catapulted to the top of that list.

Thought to be the front-runner at the outset of the campaign, Peters has been running narrowly behind Republican Terri Lynn Land in recent weeks. They are vying for the seat that retiring Democratic Sen. Carl Levin has occupied since Jimmy Carter was president.

Land was not the party’s first choice to run but has quietly won over GOP officials with a well-stocked campaign war chest and a guarded performance so far. She’s been buttressed by millions in attack ads against Peters, financed by an outside group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, pummeling the Democrat over his support for Obamacare.

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“Yes, a Republican can win,” Levin said of the race to succeed him, citing the outside money pouring in on the GOP side. “People assume it’s a solid blue state, but it’s always been a much more complex picture than that.”

The state has all the makings of a midterm battleground. Though no Democratic presidential candidate has lost here since 1988, Republicans dominate statewide offices and control the Legislature. The last time Michigan sent a Republican to the Senate was when Spencer Abraham won an open seat in 1994, a midterm election with a Democratic president and a GOP governor running for reelection.

That’s almost a mirror image of this year’s conditions.

“I just absolutely believe that the Democrats don’t know what’s going to hit them here in a few months,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), predicting that Obamacare would be a deciding factor in the race.

( PHOTOS: Senators up for election in 2014)

Peters is running at a time when Obama’s popularity is swooning and his health care law is as polarizing as ever. To counter the GOP Obamacare onslaught, Democrats are building a ground game they say will help neutralize the effects of being outspent on the air.

That means old-fashioned, retail politicking. Peters and his party are leaning on reliable allies like labor unions and local party chapters to let their voters know their slim Senate majority is on the line. Their message has an element of fear: Sit out this election, and November will be a repeat of the GOP wave of 2010.

“I’m worried,” said Laura Swenson, a retiree and a Democratic activist, at a pizza parlor in Hancock, Mich. “We need to fire up the base.”

Democrats see a clear difference between a battle-tested campaigner like Peters and Land, who easily won two lower-profile secretary of state races and recently served as a member to the Republican National Committee. They believe Land — who in an interview dodged questions about her position on the minimum wage, Medicare reform and Michigan abortion legislation — will implode once the spotlight intensifies and her record as secretary of state is picked apart.

But the race may end up coming down to numbers, something that could help the GOP in a nonpresidential year.

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In the past three presidential elections, around 5 million voters have gone to the polls, compared with just 3.3 million in the 2010 midterms. In that election, just 10 percent of African-American voters came out to vote, compared with 16 percent who voted in 2012 and helped Obama defeat this state’s native son, Mitt Romney.

Democrats hope to turn out more than 3.5 million voters this year, largely by inspiring more minorities to go to the polls. They’re focusing heavily on the bellwether Detroit suburban battlegrounds of Oakland County and Macomb County, the birthplace of Reagan Democrats and areas where Peters is well-known.

With the conservative Legislature pushing forward policies that have infuriated the left, including so-called right-to-work legislation weakening the power of labor unions, Democrats are bullish that turnout will be high as the party tries to take down GOP Gov. Rick Snyder in the fall.

But other factors could depress turnout. Voters are angry at Washington, the state’s unemployment rate is among the highest in the country and Obama’s approval numbers are underwater here.

So Peters is taking it one voter at a time, including in this sparsely populated region that’s experienced more than 200 inches of snow this season, and where he campaigned as a relative stranger.

When Peters checked in to speak before thousands of Yoopers at the dog sled race, with canines howling in the background, the event coordinator asked the congressman, “And you are?” Peters joked he would speak no longer than 20 minutes. “No, you won’t,” she responded. “We’ll sic the dogs on you.”

“We have to get to be known,” Peters said in a dinner interview over a bowl of soup, which he was forced to eat after losing a crown in his tooth during the grueling campaign swing. (Earlier in the day, the Dodge Journey he was riding in slid off the road and got stuck in a snowbank; Peters emerged unscathed.) “Obviously, my name ID is low — people know me in the Detroit metro area, but if you get outside of metro Detroit, folks don’t know me.”

He added: “That’s why I’m here at 9:30 at night, in the Upper Peninsula in February after driving through a freaking snowstorm. We stopped to do a radio interview in a guy’s house upstairs in his studio. … In Detroit, you don’t have radio interviews in someone’s attic.”

A cautious campaigner

Few would have guessed it last year, but Land, 55, now has a 3-point lead in the race, according to a poll conducted for Detroit media outlets released last week, though her advantage was within the margin of error. She leads Peters in the money race as well: After raising $2.1 million for her campaign and putting in $1.6 million of her own money, her $3.3 million in cash on hand eclipsed the $2.9 million Peters had in the bank as of year’s end. (Land declined to say how much more of her own cash she’s prepared to spend, but Peters said he plans to raise $15 million to $20 million.)

Land, a former clerk of Kent County, which covers Grand Rapids in Western Michigan, has combined solid fundraising numbers with a deliberately cautious campaign. She limits her media interviews and when she meets with activists and voters, she often doesn’t tell the press beforehand. Her campaign did invite a reporter along this week to witness her mingle with people at a boat show in downtown Detroit and meet with executives of an auto parts manufacturer in the nearby suburb of Rochester Hills.

“Love the pontoon,” she told one person at the boat show, recalling episodes from her childhood.

The careful encounters limit the potential for mistakes but have fed the Democratic attack line that Land is shielding her controversial, fiercely conservative views.

“She’s in a bunker somewhere,” Peters said.

In an interview with POLITICO, Land insisted she’s been full-throttle on the campaign trail, but she sidestepped questions on a range of issues before Congress or being debated in Michigan.

She would not weigh in on the push in Washington to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, noting that activists in Michigan had been pushing an increase to $9.50 per hour.

“I’m always willing to look at it. I think until we find out what exactly [the proposal] is going to be, I think we need to wait and hear,” she said. “But the bigger issue is to get back to a good paying job.”

When asked about Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan, she said, “There’s lots of plans out there. I think the more immediate thing is we have to repeal Obamacare.”

She also declined to say whether she still believes, as she said previously, that Obamacare should be defunded as a condition for keeping the federal government open.

And a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants? Land also called it “hypothetical” even though a Senate bill with the widely debated provision is awaiting action in the House.

“Obviously, we need a secure border — that’s No. 1,” she said.

Land did say she supported the Michigan right to work law and said “at this point” she would not sign the Grover Norquist pledge vowing to oppose any new taxes. And she also said the “only exception” she supported for abortion was to save the life of the mother, not mentioning rape or incest.

But when asked if she backed a new Michigan law barring insurers from paying for abortions unless women obtain separate coverage, Land would only say: “My position is government shouldn’t pay for abortions.”

Part of Land’s pitch to voters will be her two terms as secretary of state, for which she said she made the office work more efficiently. But Democrats say there are plenty of holes to poke in her record. In 2005, for instance, Land sought to remove inactive voters from the rolls, but was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union for allegedly violating federal law preventing the disenfranchisement of legitimate voters. A federal judge in 2008 ruled against Land’s effort.

Asked if she regretted the episode, Land said: “The challenge you got on a daily basis is to make sure you have an accurate list.”

An Obamacare ad barrage

In many ways, the campaign has yet to get fully under way. Only Peters is being hammered on TV by some $1.6 million worth of ads from the Koch-backed group, Americans for Prosperity, blasting his support for the health care law.

At times, the message has spilled over to the campaign trail. That seemed to be the case in L’Anse, Mich., when the head of a small manufacturing company blamed the law for hurting his company.

“It’s been brutal,” said Mark Massicotte of L’Anse Manufacturing during a meeting with Peters. “Health care costs are killing me.”

As a freshman congressman in 2010, Peters voted for the health care law over howls of protest among constituents at angry town halls and warnings it would cost him his suburban Detroit swing district House seat.

Peters insists he has no regrets. Problems with the law need to be fixed, he said, and he’s willing to delay the individual health insurance mandate to get the program working as promised. But he’d do the same thing over again.

“There are very few votes that I can make in Congress that will literally save tens of thousands of people,” he said.

Still, Peters is trying to sell himself as the most moderate Democrat in his delegation who will split from his party from time to time, a contrast, he says, from Land’s more ideological approach.

There are other votes Peters has cast that Republicans are bound to use against him, including his support of the cap-and-trade climate change legislation that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi strong-armed through the House in 2009. Despite her polarizing reputation, Peters praises Pelosi’s leadership, saying she’s worked to “build consensus.”

“She’s never pressured me — ever — to vote one way or the other,” he said. “She’s been very helpful to me.”

Peters added, if he wins November’s election, he’d have “no reason” to oppose Harry Reid as majority leader.

And while he has not sought to distance himself greatly from the White House, Peters accused Obama of turning a “deaf ear” to concerns about his push to fast-track international trade pacts.

“I find that extremely frustrating,” Peters said.

That’s about as riled up as the even-keeled Peters gets. GOP critics say Peters lacks the ability to excite the base ahead of November — or a record of accomplishments beyond his regular support of the White House’s agenda.

“He’s not going to get you whipped up on your feet and teary-eyed for the elections,” Rogers said. “It’s just not his style. So he is a traditional Democrat in that sense.”

But Peters — who earned a law degree, an MBA and a masters of philosophy and served as a Navy reservist — says that analysis falls short. He says he has shown repeatedly he can compete in tough political environments — he’s won several tough House races and barely lost a 2002 race for attorney general, the closest statewide race in half-a-century in Michigan.

At two campaign stops last week, Peters touted his work to bar an industrial facility from storing large mounds of so-called petroleum coke — a coal-like substance that’s a byproduct of Canadian tar sands oil — near the Detroit River. The facility, Peters pointed out, was owned by a subsidiary of Koch Industries — the same Kochs going after him on the airwaves.

“On Election Day, the people of Michigan will get up and say, ‘Enough is enough,’” Peters said. “We will not let you buy this election.”