Anne GeggisLongtime Democratic U.S. House member faces Republican West Palm Beach financial planner for district that includes Mar-a-Lago.
Congressional districts have been redrawn at President Donald Trump’s urging, sending most of Florida’s Democratic delegation into Republican territories.
But the new lines decisively benefit only one Democrat in Florida, and she happens to be Trump’s own congressional representative, Lois Frankel, who is being challenged by a Republican in search of her first elected office.
Frankel of West Palm Beach faces Deborah Adeimy, a West Palm Beach financial planner, in District 23, which gained registered Democrats in the redraw.
This year’s rare mid-decade redistricting started as an attempt to forestall the bloodbath that the current president’s party commonly suffers in the midterm election.
Frankel is in some of the familiar territory she’s been representing since she first took her congressional seat in 2013: It contains most of her old district, which encompasses coastal communities from Riviera Beach to Delray Beach, including the Palm Beach home of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, and west to Greenacres and unincorporated Delray Beach. It includes a part of West Palm Beach, where she served for eight years as mayor.
Counting the money raised and elections won between the district’s candidates, it’s a lopsided race between Republican Adeimy, 56, in her third bid for Congress, and Frankel, 78, who’s been in elected office for decades.
To look at Frankel’s campaign materials — and hear her talk — she’s running against the man who flies into an airport recently named after him and rides to his Palm Beach estate on a street bearing his name.
‘My real opponent is Donald Trump’
“I’ve never met my opponent,” Frankel said at a recent voter meet-and-greet at Palm Beach State College west of Lake Worth Beach, speaking of Adeimy. “I don’t even know who she is. … My real opponent is Donald Trump.
“He’s wrecking the country,” she added.
If the Democrats take back the House, Frankel says she expects to be chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Assistance.
“I’m going to oversee (U.S. Secretary of State) Marco Rubio’s budget, the State Department budget,” Frankel said. “That’s my assignment.”
Adeimy said she couldn’t just let Frankel take a walk to victory — and expressed consternation that the district that includes Good Samaritan Medical Center where she was born could swing like this.
“When you give someone nine points (of advantage in party voter registration), that’s massive,” Adeimy said.
Money raised and donors
Adeimy has raised $196,857, with the largest portion coming from her own wallet, according to her quarterly report filed Sept. 30. She’s given her campaign $90,701 in in-kind donations, which include rent and utilities, and loaned it $65,466 cash.
Frankel, in contrast, has raised $2.6 million. Of that, $657,000, or 25%, came from political action committees.
AIPAC, the U.S. pro-Israel lobbying organization, has been one of Frankel’s reliable supporters and this year, as it’s become more controversial, was among those giving her $10,000.
Other PACs that gave the same are U.S. Sugar Corp.; the American Association for Justice; the American Society of Anesthesiologists; Employees of Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense tech company that has an office in Palm Beach Gardens; and a group identified in campaign finance reports as “OCPG,” which is not registered as a PAC.
Frankel has spent $1.9 million compared with Adeimy’s $170,000.
The campaign
Trump is featured prominently in Frankel’s campaign materials. One urges people to request their vote-by-mail ballot with an unflattering picture of the president under the headline “Time is running out,” in all caps. And then, in smaller all-caps type, “Don’t let Donald Trump silence your voice.”
Adeimy doesn’t have a lot to say about the president directly. He is not prominently featured on her website. You have to click on the gallery to find a picture of her with Trump.
Even without his official endorsement, though, Adeimy’s online campaign reel touches on themes associated with the MAGA movement. She discusses how her grandfather and father ran a construction company, leaving the name “Adeimy” stamped on many buildings. The driveway and the entrance of Mar-a-Lago were among the company’s projects.
She says she’s met Trump 10 times but didn’t expect he would weigh into her race. And it appears that Trump is ready to concede his home district to Frankel — Adeimy has been left off his list of 24 congressional endorsements posted on Thursday.
Frankel’s 30-second website reel is less biographical than Adeimy’s, featuring women concerned about losing their reproductive rights under Republicans. Frankel doesn’t start speaking until 9 seconds into the spot.
“Extremists are coming for our reproductive rights, and I’m leading the fight to stop them,” Frankel says.
Adeimy gets no airtime on Frankel’s website, but Adeimy puts her alongside former President Joe Biden as the word “wokeism” flashes on her website reel.
“The Democrat Party is no more,” Adeimy says over the images. “Call it what you want: liberalism, socialism, wokeism. Everything it touches, it destroys.”
Frankel mailers say she’s “fighting for us” — “standing up to MAGA, lowering the cost of living, defending Social Security, protecting fair elections, championing reproductive freedom.”
Adeimy’s reel, however, says the Democrats’ “trillion dollar spending” caused the current inflation.
The personal
Adeimy, a graduate of Cardinal Newman High School, is a fifth-generation Floridian. The mother of grown twin sons and another son attending the University of Florida has been a certified financial planner throughout her career.
She ran for Congress twice before, both times defeated in the Republican primary for Frankel’s seat by Dan Franzese, who ran in District 25 this year.
She did not fill out the questionnaire circulated in the League of Women Voters of Palm Beach County guide. She also said it was too close to the election to answer questions from Stet News about restoring the Obamacare subsidies allowed to expire under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the war in Iran or the president’s agenda in general.
She did say that, as a financial planner, reforming Social Security is at the top of her agenda.
“To have someone with decades of inside knowledge of how it all works in the banking system, in the capital markets, I think would be very advantageous to provide all of that insight,” Adeimy said.
Frankel, a New York City native and mother of one grown child, received her law degree from Georgetown University in 1973. After a stint as an assistant public defender in Palm Beach County, she won her first elected office in 1986, to the Florida House. There she rose to become the first female minority leader. In Tallahassee, she served seven, non-consecutive terms as a state representative before becoming West Palm Beach’s strong mayor, serving from 2003 to 2011.
Routinely, Frankel on social media champions the cause of those losing their benefits, victims of shootings and immigrants on the losing side of Trump’s agenda, to much online scorn. Frankel doesn’t hesitate to use words like “abortion” and advocate for preventive AIDS medicine.
Adeimy says it’s time for her to move on.
“Help Retire mean Lois Frankel Grandmother of Corruption,” is the tagline on Adeimy’s two-minute biographical video.
