Sandra (Sandy) Adams was a unifying Republican candidate
in 2010. She had the support of both the populist Tea
Party movement, which praised her status as a Washington
outsider and supported her calls to reduce the debt, as
well as Florida’s party establishment.1 An experienced state
legislator, Adams used her career in law enforcement to work
on a number of issues in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Her House tenure came to an end after reapportionment
pitted her against a 10-term Republican incumbent.
Sandra Kay Daniels was born in Wyandotte, Michigan,
on December 14, 1956. Her father Noah Daniels, a career
Navy sailor, rose to chief petty officer during World War II.
Her mother, Shirley M. Daniels, stayed at home and raised
the children. The family frequently moved as her father
received new assignments, but in 1964, upon his retirement,
the family settled in Florida.2
Adams attended high school in Florida but dropped
out at 17 to join the United States Air Force, following her
brother’s path into the military. Adams served from 1974 to
1975. In the service, she met and married her first husband
with whom she has a daughter, Sonya Michelle.3 Adams
eventually escaped her abusive relationship and took their
daughter with her. “I realized really soon that my husband
had a penchant for drinking,” Adams recalled, “and when
he drank he turned very mean, very violent.”4 They later
divorced. Adams earned a high-school equivalency degree
in 1983 while working and putting her daughter through
school. Adams went on to get a BA in 2000 from Columbia
College’s satellite campus in Orlando, Florida, majoring in
criminal justice administration.5 Adams began working in
the Orange County sheriff’s department in Florida in 1985.
She met and married a co-worker, Deputy Sheriff Frank
Seton, who died in a helicopter accident during a high-speed
chase in 1989. Adams married Circuit Judge John H. Adams
in 2001, and they have two children: John Jr. and Kathryn.6
In the sheriff ’s office, Adams rose from investigator to
deputy sheriff. She eventually became active in victims’
rights organizations and ended her 17-year law-enforcement
career when she won a seat as a Republican in the Florida
house of representatives.7 She ran as a “no-nonsense
conservative,” highlighting her career in law enforcement
by portraying herself as “tough on criminals, strong on
homeland security issues.” As a state lawmaker, Adams
concentrated on criminal justice legislation. She also
sponsored bills dealing with the hiring of undocumented
immigrants. One of her successful bills required a
referendum before Florida could participate in the
Affordable Care Act, which Congress created in 2010.8
For her first national political race, Adams entered
the 2010 race for a central Florida district represented by
Suzanne M. Kosmas. Kosmas was elected to the U.S. House
of Representatives in 2008 when the Republican incumbent
was caught in a corruption scandal, but she remained one
of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents for 2010.
Adams entered the crowded Republican primary where
she faced businesspersons Karen Diebel and Craig Miller.
Adams promised to shrink the federal government while also
supporting funding increases for the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA), which employed a significant
number of people in the district. She made headlines when
she questioned the constitutionality of the Departments of
Education, Energy, and Interior. “They spent a lot of money
over the last few years,” she said during the campaign. “Some
of that money could have been devoted to the space industry.
We need to re-prioritize.” Adams narrowly won the primary
with 30 percent of the vote, largely due to the endorsement
of the small-government Tea Party movement that had
emerged in opposition to the Affordable Care Act.9
Kosmas targeted Adams’s positions as extreme, such
as repealing the 17th Amendment (the direct election of
senators) or replacing the income tax with a 23-percent sales
tax. Adams criticized Kosmas for supporting Democratic
health care reforms and reminded voters of her law enforcement
career by taking a strong stand on illegal
immigration. “I don’t believe in amnesty,” she said. The
district elected Adams with 60 percent of the vote.10
Adams’s election came in a wave year for Republicans,
who captured the House majority for the 112th Congress
(2011–2013). Given Adams’s law-enforcement background,
party leaders assigned her to the powerful Judiciary
Committee, where she could work on immigration
issues. Her other appointment on the Science, Space, and
Technology Committee directly benefited her district. She
fought to relaunch NASA manned space flights, including
a Mars mission. Adams also called NASA’s climate change
research a distraction that “undercuts one of NASA’s primary
and most important objectives”—manned spaceflight.11
Adams, a former law-enforcement official who survived
an abusive first marriage, played a prominent role during
the second session when she introduced a bill to renew
the Violence Against Women Act for another five years.12
Though the bill passed the House, it languished in the
Senate as the two chambers argued over the coverage and
various versions of the reauthorization. In the end, the
Violence Against Women Act was not reauthorized until the
first session of the 113th Congress (2013–2015).
Following the 2010 U.S. Census, Florida’s new
congressional district map pitted a record number of
incumbents against each other. The state cut Adams’s district
in half, and John L. Mica, a 10-term Republican Member who
had been Chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure
Committee, chose to run in Adams’s district after his own
district was re-drawn. Adams lost to Mica in the GOP
primary by a margin of 61 to 39 percent. She retired from
the House at the end of the 112th Congress in early 2013.13
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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