I'm Jonathan K. Parton, welcome to K-Part. The midterm elections are less than a month away,

and Democrats are not only hoping to hold their razor-thin majority in the Senate,

they're also hoping to pick up two more seats. The person leading that effort is the chair of

the Democratic Sen. Campaign Committee, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan. In this conversation,

first recorded for Washington Post Live on October 12, Senator Peters talked about what's at stake

in general and the races in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in particular.

But Senator Peters is also the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee,

and it was his message to Republican silence in the face of threats to our democracy

that was most gripping. It's incumbent on the American people to expect more

from their elected officials, and when elected officials remain silent, when they need to speak out,

voters need to punish that behavior and make sure there were electing candidates

who will stand up for American democracy.

So over the summer, as you well know, Democrats seem to have the wind at their backs,

but we're now less than four weeks away from election day, and the polls and key races

are tightening for Democratic candidates. What changed?

Well, actually, nothing changed from what we anticipated. We knew the polls would be tightening,

and we knew that these elections are all going to be nail-biders. They're all going to be very close.

If you would have asked me last year, where do you see these races going into the last few weeks,

I would have told you all of these battleground states are going to be very, very tight.

It's going to be critical for us to have a ground operation to make sure that we turn out voters.

As you know, Jonathan, we have voter turnout in a midterm tends to drop off from where a

presidential election is, and so turnout is a major factor. It's something at the DSCC,

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