Democrats eye solidly GOP 1st Congressional District but odds are long
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While much of the national attention headed into Election Day is centered around battleground districts in Michigan's Lower Peninsula, Democrats are making a push to flip the state's largest congressional district, which has been solidly controlled by Republicans for more than a decade.
Michigan's 1st Congressional District is made up of the entirety of the Upper Peninsula and several counties in the northern Lower Peninsula, encompassing communities such as Traverse City, Petoskey, Cheboygan and Alpena.
While the nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated the district "Solid Republican," the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, U.S. House Democrats' campaign arm, has added the 1st Congressional District to its list of districts in play.
U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Watersmeet, a retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant general, has represented the district since 2017, succeeding the late U.S. Rep. Dan Benishek, R-Crystal Falls, who served for three terms before that.
In 2024, Bergman faced off against Callie Barr, an attorney raised in Traverse City and Cheboygan who helped veterans access free legal support. Bergman was reelected in a landslide victory, defeating Barr by more than 20 percentage points.
However, Republicans are facing headwinds. Historically members of the party in opposition to the president have gained House seats during the midterm, and rising costs on gas, groceries and other everyday needs amid the war in Iran have soured voters on President Donald Trump and his promise to lower costs while in office.
Barr's campaign has also received a boost from former Democratic U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who now lives in Elk Rapids.
Gongwer News Service reports that Stabenow has appointed her former campaign manager, Dan Farough, to run Barr's campaign. Barr has also received ad support from VoteVets, a political action committee focused on electing Democrats to support veterans and military families.
"People kind of write off Northern Michigan, but the reality is it was a seat held by a Democrat for 18 years, Bart Stupak, and then he retired, and it became the era of Trump, and it became Republican and Jack Bergman's been there for 10 years, and not really had anybody focus on him," Stabenow told reporters on an Oct. 15 media call.
Speaking to reporters after an Oct. 17 roundtable in Michigan's 10th Congressional District with battleground candidate Christina Hines, U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York, said Stabenow had been in touch.
"Listen, we're very excited about the opportunities here in Michigan ... I've been in touch with Senator Stabenow. She encouraged me to send financial support and I recently did just that," Jeffries said referring to Barr's campaign.
Barr, Stabenow and the Michigan Democratic Party have also sought to highlight multiple controversies over the course of Bergman's time in office, referencing news articles raising questions on Bergman's participation in a taxpayer-funded program reimbursing the representative's meal and housing expenses and scrutinizing his chief of staff for running a political consulting firm in Michigan while avoiding financial disclosures around the business.
More recently, The Detroit News reported that Bergman was living in a Washington, D.C., home sold to Bergman's daughter by campaign supporters, although his campaign has said Bergman paid fair market value for his rent on the home "and is in full compliance with House Ethics."
"The people of Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula face terrible challenges because of tariffs and fuel prices, and Jack Bergman voted for all of it," Barr said in a campaign statement touting the campaign's recent fundraising haul. "People are frustrated by his corruption in office and complete failure to fight for us. Voters are ready to fire him on Tuesday Nov. 3."
When asked about Democrats' efforts to flip the seat and the accusations of corruption leveled against the incumbent, Bergman spokesperson James Hogge said the race "isn't even close."
"Crooked Callie Barr's campaign has spent four years attacking General Bergman's record, and her latest ad is another example of just how far she's willing to stretch the truth," Hogge said, referencing an ad in which Barr blames Bergman for delays in PFAS cleanup at Michigan military bases.
"Her newest ad literally claims General Bergman 'chairs the Air Force Subcommittee,'" Hogge said. "There's just one problem - that subcommittee doesn't even exist. This isn't a matter of opinion - it's a basic fact anyone can verify."
Bergman serves on the U.S. House Committee on Armed Services on the Readiness Subcommittee and the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee. While there is no Air Force Subcommittee, there is a Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.
While Democrats are talking tough on the campaign trail, some Michigan political consultants say Barr's victory remains a longshot.
Dennis Lennox, a Republican public affairs consultant based in Cheboygan County, said he expected to see another Bergman victory in November.
"Now that's not to say that Jack Bergman is going to win by 21 points again," Lennox told Michigan Advance. "It very well could be, you know, a seven-point victory or an eight-point victory based on the national trends and the generic ballot lead that Democrats unquestionably have."
Lennox theorized that talk of flipping the 1st Congressional District is more of an attempt to draw Republican spending away from supporting incumbent candidates in hotly contested seats.
"I've seen this play before," he said. "This is a pretty well-played trick that both parties will spend a little bit of money in the final stretch in one of these out-of-reach seats to try to deke the other side and get them to redeploy resources."
Rather than watching what the political parties or candidates are saying publicly, Lennox said people should be watching what they're doing.
"I think if Jack Bergman thought he was going to lose, you would be seeing Donald Trump or JD Vance flying into Traverse City or Marquette, and you don't see that yet, which tells me that the internal polls don't show this to be a close race," Lennox said.
The biggest difficulty Barr faces in attempting to flip the district, Lennox said, is that she hasn't demonstrated herself to be a "different kind of Democrat."
He later noted that Bart Stupak, the previous Democratic representative who held the seat from 1993 to 2011, was an outlier within his party, supporting the Second Amendment and opposing abortion, earning endorsements from groups such as the National Rifle Association and Right to Life of Michigan.
"If you're a Democrat and you align with those two issues, you tend to do well in northern and upper Michigan," Lennox said.
As for Bergman, he's facing the same issue as other Republicans, Lennox said.
"He is swimming against the tide," Lennox said. "It's just a question of how big are those waves? To defeat Jack Bergman, you don't need a blue wave, you need a blue tsunami."
In an interview with the Advance, Adrian Hemond, a Democratic consultant and CEO of the bipartisan advocacy firm Grassroots Midwest, called the 1st Congressional District a "stretch-goal seat," which was potentially attainable at the outside edge of a very good election night for Democrats.
Stipulating that he wrote a "fairly-sizable" check to Barr's campaign at Stabenow's request, Hemond said the odds of a Democratic victory in the district were "maybe one chance in 10."
However, there are multiple factors that put this district in play for Democrats, Hemond explained, pointing to the war in Iran and its impact on fuel costs as one example.
"Public transport is functionally a fiction up there," Hemond said. "If you're going anywhere in the 1st Congressional District, you are driving there."
Additionally, the biggest industries in those parts of the state are tourism and agriculture, both of which have suffered under Trump's policies, Hemond said.
"We're just coming off a harvest season. Every one of those crops comes out of the ground with a diesel-powered machine, then it gets trucked to market in a diesel-powered semi, and then you have to try and sell it into the state's largest trading partner, Canada, while we're embroiled in a tariff war with them. Also, the Canadians aren't coming to visit right now for some fairly obvious reasons," Hemond said. "So the president has, in a very meaningful sense, put this district in play."
Alongside those factors, more Democrats are moving into the northern part of the state, Hemond said, pointing to Stabenow as one example.
"You've got people from Chicago and Madison and Milwaukee and Green Bay that are buying property in the southern U.P., right? On the north coast of Lake Michigan," Hemond said. "So the people who are moving into this district are by and large Democrats."
He also pointed to the heavy concentration of Dem-adjacent voters in Marquette County and the northwestern Lower Peninsula's shift toward Democrats, while emphasizing that a Democratic victory in the district would still require an amazing night for Democrats.
In addition to mobilizing new supporters and winning over a significant margin of independents, Hemond also noted Trump supporters' turnout will also be a factor.
"There are Republicans and there are Trump supporters, and there's a great deal of overlap between those two things, but they are not qualitatively the same thing," Hemond said. "Part of Donald Trump's electoral success is getting people to show up who are not typically voters. And the other thing that Callie Barr needs in order to win this race is for enough of the president's supporters to decide it's not that important to vote this year."
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