He lost a statewide race by 0.17 percent and chose not to contest it
In 2002 Gary Peters lost Michigan's attorney general election by about 5,200 votes, even though one Dearborn precinct had logged 96 votes for him instead of 396. He let the result stand. Six years later he won a House seat, and in 2014 he became Michigan's senator, a seat he has held since 2015.
A Pontiac native, Peters arrived on December 1, 1958, the son of a schoolteacher who had served in the Army in the Second World War and a French-born nurse's aide who met his father during the war and helped unionise her workplace. His family has lived in Michigan since the 1840s. He graduated magna cum laude from Alma College in 1980 and collected an MBA, a law degree and master's degrees in political science and philosophy along the way.
His early career was in finance: 22 years as an investment adviser, first at Merrill Lynch and from 1989 at Paine Webber. At 34 he joined the Navy Reserve, serving more than a decade with a Seabee construction battalion, including time in the Persian Gulf supporting Operation Southern Watch and further overseas duty after the September 11 attacks. He left in 2008 as a lieutenant commander.
Politics began locally, on the Rochester Hills City Council in 1991. He then spent eight years in the Michigan Senate representing one of the state's most diverse districts, where he sponsored a law banning new wells beneath the state's Great Lakes waters except in an energy emergency; it took effect without the governor's signature. The narrow 2002 defeat was Michigan's closest statewide contest since 1950, and Governor Jennifer Granholm then made him lottery commissioner.
In 2008 he unseated an eight-term Republican with 52 percent of the vote, becoming the first Democrat to represent that suburban district since its creation in 1933. Redistricting later moved him to a Detroit-based seat, which he won with 82 percent in 2012. During the auto crisis the House financial services chairman Barney Frank called him the most effective opponent of letting Detroit go bankrupt, and he worked on debt relief for Chrysler. Elected to the Senate in 2014 as that year's only newly elected Democratic senator, he announced in January 2025 that he would not run again in 2026.
Source: Gary Peters
