Michigan's Gary Peters won't seek reelection to US Senate

WASHINGTON — Gary Peters, Michigan’s senior senator and a former congressman, said he won’t seek reelection next year and will retire from the U.S. Senate when his second term ends in January 2027.

In an exclusive interview, the Bloomfield Township Democrat told The Detroit News that he is ready to leave public office in two years and move onto a “new chapter” that includes spending more time with his family ― particularly a new grandchild who lives on the West Coast.

“I always thought there would be a time that I would step aside and pass the reins for the next generation. I also never saw service in Congress as something you do your whole life,” said Peters, who was first elected to the Senate in 2014.

“And that goes back to 2008 when I first won that House seat. I thought it would be for a matter of a few terms that I would serve, and then I would go back to private life.”

Peters’ decision is likely to surprise many of his colleagues and ignite an intense scramble on both sides of the aisle for his seat in battleground Michigan.

At 66, Peters is relatively young for a U.S. senator, but after 10 years in the Senate and six in the House, he has decided to pass the torch to a younger generation. He has other things he wants to do, like finding “endless, winding roads” for his Harley Davidson, he said. It’s a decision he’s been mulling for several months.

“I think this is pretty normal for everybody to say, I've done a job, and I'm proud of the job I did, but there are other things I want to do in my life. There are other ways that I can give back to the community,” Peters said.

“I want to be very clear: I'm not retiring. I'm just not running for reelection in the Senate. I hope, God willing, I have a lot more good years ahead.”

Asked if he would run for governor of Michigan or any other elected office, Peters said no. He’s instead focused on “finishing strong” for his last two years in the Senate, where he serves as the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security panel and is the new co-chair of the Auto Caucus.

“There’s still a lot of work to do. We have issues related to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, natural disasters, cybersecurity to border security, and I'm intimately involved in all these issues, and we'll continue to do that,” Peters said.

“The great thing is this really allows me to just be completely, completely focused on the day-to-day work that I do as a U.S. senator and fight for issues that are important to people here in Michigan.”

Blow to Michigan clout

Peters has trained much of his focus in Congress on issues related to Michigan's auto industry, the Great Lakes, cybersecurity, veterans issues, toxic PFAS contamination and initiatives to make government more efficient. His annual motorcycle tour around the state has become a staple of lawmakers’ August recess.

Peters also has been a major advocate for Selfridge Air National Guard Base, leading the Michigan delegation in securing a new squadron of KC-46A Pegasus refueling tankers and getting funding and authorization for the Macomb County base to host the new Northern Border Mission Center.

Peters' decision to not seek reelection in 2026 follows last year’s blockbuster battle for the seat of Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Lansing Democrat who retired earlier this month after 24 years in the Senate.

Democrat Elissa Slotkin, a former congresswoman from Holly, succeeded Stabenow this month after defeating Republican former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers of White Lake Township in November with the narrowest margin of victory among Democratic Senate candidates nationally, about 19,000 votes.

Peters’ departure would deliver another blow to Michigan’s clout in Washington. He’s the delegation’s most senior Democrat and has secured seats on some of the Senate’s most influential committees, including Appropriations, Armed Services and the powerful Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that’s important to Michigan’s auto industry.

Prior to Peters, Michigan hadn’t had an appropriator in the Senate since 1958, he said ― a reference to GOP Sen. Charles Potter.

“I'm confident the seat will stay Democratic, and I'm gonna do everything I can to make sure that that is indeed the case,” said Peters, who just completed two consecutive election cycles as chairman of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm.

“We've got a lot of young, dynamic folks who can run for this office, who have distinguished themselves, so I suspect there'll be a number of folks who will be interested. I’ll encourage them to run. But I know that there's no shortage of talent.”

Political resume

Born in 1958, Peters grew up in Rochester Hills in a union household, the son of a public school teacher and a nurse’s aide who helped organize the nursing home where she worked and became a steward in the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Peters’ parents met in France during World War II when his father was stationed in his mother’s town and serving at Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters after the invasion of Normandy.

In Michigan, Peters graduated from Alma College and worked as a financial adviser for over two decades, including management positions at Merrill Lynch and UBS/PaineWebber. He spent 12 years in the U.S. Navy Reserve.

His first stint in elected politics was on the Rochester Hills City Council in 1991, followed by two terms in the state Senate from 1995-2002. Peters ran unsuccessfully for attorney general against Republican Mike Cox in 2002 before his appointment as the state lottery commissioner by Democratic then Gov. Jennifer Granholm in 2003.

He won election to the U.S. House in 2008, defeating 16-year incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg by nearly 9.5 percentage points.

Peters served three House terms before succeeding longtime Sen. Carl Levin, D-Detroit, in the Senate by winning a 2014 race against Republican former Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land by 13 percentage points.

That year, Peters was the only Senate Democratic freshman elected amid a GOP midterm wave when Republicans picked up nine seats in the U.S. Senate, and Michigan Republicans picked up other statewide offices.

Peters won a second term in 2020, defeating GOP businessman John James by about 2 percentage points after a contentious, high-profile campaign that broke fundraising records at the time. James was elected to the U.S. House in 2022.

Peters said he’s most proud of his record of bipartisanship while in the Senate. The nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked him the No. 1 senator for effectiveness in the 116th and 117th Congresses. In the 117th, he had 19 measures signed into law, according to his office, and 10 in the 116th.

The 116th Congress covered the years he served in the minority under GOP President Donald Trump and ran for reelection against James ― a campaign in which Republicans claimed Peters was "invisible" and "the politician known for doing nothing."

“Probably every bill that I've got passed is because I've actually walked over to the House, I've set up a meeting with the Republican leader in that committee, and I'll sit down and first build a relationship,” Peters said. “The first part of the conversation has nothing to do with the bill.”

Legislative legacy

While in the House, Peters sat on the conference panel that finalized the sweeping 2010 Dodd-Frank reforms to Wall Street and the banking system. During his House days, Peters said he was also “intimately” involved in the federal rescue of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC when the Michigan automakers were hit by the 2008 financial crisis.

More recently, Peters wrote parts of the CHIPS and Science Act to ensure the legislation supported not just the domestic manufacturing of top-of-the-line computer chips but also the “legacy” chips used in automobiles, he said.

A 2018 legislative provision authored by Peters created the National Center of Expertise for the Great Lakes, located at Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie and at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor. The center’s mission is to do research and training activities to prepare the Coast Guard for oil spills in freshwater or ice-laden environments.

That idea arose out of Peters’ concern about an oil spill or leak from Energy Inc.'s Line 5 and his questioning of the Coast Guard commandant in committee. Peters recalled asking him how confident he was that the Coast Guard could clean up a spill in the Great Lakes.

“And his quote was, ‘I'm not confident at all. I'm not sure we could do that,’ which is pretty frightening,” Peters said. “That's why I went to work to create this center of expertise, which is up and running now. It's about protecting fresh water all over the country from an oil spill.”

Peters was among the first in the Senate to sound the alarm about toxic PFAS contaminants, holding the first Senate hearing on the topic in 2018, he said. He passed a bill to discontinue the use of PFAS- containing fire-fighting foams at commercial airports.

Homeland Security investigations under Peters as chair probed Secret Service failures in relation to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last year, intelligence failures ahead of the Jan. 6 attack in 2021, and the country's overreliance on China, India and other countries for crucial pharmaceutical drugs.

The panel also passed legislation to protect people's privacy and protect systems from ransomware and other attacks. A 2022 bill by Peters required that the owners of critical infrastructure like banks and electric grids promptly report to federal officials major cyber attacks or ransomware payments.

A bill that was meaningful to Peters personally, he said, was one to help veterans who were given a less-than-honorable discharge from the military due to behavior resulting from post-traumatic stress disorder or Traumatic Brain Injury conditions that were not diagnosed.

The idea for the bill came from a homeless veteran in Grand Rapids who fit that description, Peters said.

“He went to the VA because he knew something was really bad, and the VA said, ‘Well, you're suffering from PTSD as a result of your service in Afghanistan, but because you have a bad paper discharge, we can't treat you,” Peters recalled.

His 2016 legislation allowed veterans like that individual to get their status changed so they can get care or educational benefits from the VA.

“He's now getting the treatment that he certainly earned and deserves,” Peters said.

Peters doesn’t have plans for after he leaves the Senate, but a teaching job in academia or policy work at a think tank fit his interests. He wants to continue to play a role in developing public policy, he said, particularly around ensuring equitable access to changes in technology like artificial intelligence.

Peters previously served as the Griffin Endowed Chair of American government at Central Michigan University and was working on a doctorate in philosophy at Michigan State University when he put it on hold to run for Congress.

“The PhD is still on hold right now, but who knows?” Peters said. “Maybe it could be part of that next chapter.”

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