Among the truest things you can say about Mark Begich—the imperiled Alaska Democrat, whose loss this November might flip the Senate—is that he’s sweet. Easygoing, plain-looking, and sweet. He’s a meaty handshake guy. Someone who will happily don a lei at a pancake breakfast and talk for hours with people who were going to vote for him anyway.

It’s also fair to say that he has performed without distinction as a senator since winning a fluke election six years ago. He doesn’t have a trademark issue; no important bill bears his name. As a Democrat from a red state, he landed positions on both the commerce and appropriations committees, but according to one commerce staffer who claims to like Begich personally, he often arrives at meetings unprepared and asks questions whose answers lie in summaries just in front of him.

His senatorial career probably never should have begun. Eight days before the 2008 race, a jury convicted his opponent, Ted Stevens—a one-man imperium who served more years in the Senate than any other Republican—for failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts. But it turned out that prosecutors had withheld evidence. In 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder asked that the verdict be set aside and the indictment be dismissed with prejudice, a rare move meaning the case could never be filed again. Still, all that occurred after Begich had sneaked in by just 3,724 votes. And so Alaska finds itself with its first Democratic incumbent senator in 30 years.

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