Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, whose decision not to run for reelection this year set off a fiercely competitive race in Michigan to succeed him, has lined up a new job once he leaves office in January.
Peters has accepted an offer to lead the University of Southern California’s politics center alongside Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican campaign strategist. He plans to teach classes at the university’s campuses in Los Angeles and D.C. He will succeed Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who is retiring.
The center — the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future — is similar to the Harvard Institute of Politics and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, which bring former lawmakers, journalists and political operatives to the campus as fellows. USC’s current fellows include Mike Donilon, a former top White House aide to President Joe Biden, and the Republican political consultant Mike Madrid.
In an interview, Peters said he would try to teach his students something that has become increasingly difficult to practice: the art of working together across party lines.
“The idea behind the center is that we come together to work on ways that we can work in a bipartisan way to solve the tough problems that we face as a country,” Peters said. “And that’s basically my record.”
Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has worked with Republicans to pass dozens of bills, often by unanimous consent. But that work has gotten harder during his 18 years in Congress, he said.
“People who I’ve been able to work with who want to be legislators, who actually want to be lawmakers — when they leave, they tend to be replaced with folks who are less interested in actually doing the work of lawmaking,” Peters said. “Many of the new people coming in are more interested in performance politics than they are in getting bills passed.”
Peters’s decision is not entirely unexpected. He disclosed in June that he was negotiating with the university, in compliance with Senate ethics rules.
The job marks a return to the career path that Peters envisioned for himself when he was approached nearly two decades ago about running for Congress. He was teaching part-time at Central Michigan University and planned to go into academia, he said. Instead, he flipped a Republican-held House seat in 2008 and was elected to the Senate in 2014.
Peters’s decision not to run for reelection this year set off a fractious Democratic primary to succeed him.
Peters initially declined to take sides but eventually endorsed Rep. Haley Stevens, who narrowly lost the primary last month to Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). El-Sayed’s outspoken criticism of Israel and progressive stances have convinced Republicans that they have a strong shot of flipping the seat.
A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted this month found El-Sayed leading the Republican nominee, former congressman Mike Rogers, 48 percent to 45 percent among likely voters, even though 53 percent of likely voters would prefer that Democrats control the Senate.
Peters, a former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairman, said he always expected the race for his seat to be competitive. But he also anticipated when he decided not to run that “the midterm was likely to be one in which Democrats could do very well.” President Donald Trump won Michigan in 2024, but the state has not elected a Republican to the Senate in more than three decades.
Peters endorsed El-Sayed after the primary and said that he is confident El-Sayed will win — and that he will invite El-Sayed to speak to his students if he does. Peters also plans to invite Republican senators to speak.
Peters, 67, is relatively young for a senator leaving office. He is only four years older than Rogers, and he is younger than nine senators who are running for reelection this year as well as two Democratic Senate candidates: former senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and former governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina.
Peters said he decided not to run in part because he believed that the Founding Fathers intended members of Congress to serve for a time, then return to private life. Most Michiganders are retired by the time they are his age, he said — though he is not retiring.
“People say, ‘What are you going to miss about the Senate?’” Peters said. “And I say, ‘Well, I’ll be 68 when I leave and everybody tells me I am just so young. I’m going to miss that.’”
The post Sen. Gary Peters, headed for academia, says he’s confident El-Sayed will win seat appeared first on Washington Post.
