For years, Republican candidates have raised money and worked hard to unseat Lois Frankel, but they haven’t been able to do it. Andrew Gutmann could be the person best positioned to change that history.
Florida is changing fast, and the numbers say that Frankel’s district is changing along with the rest of Florida. Democratic voters are still in the majority, but not by much. For the first time, Democrats only make up 39% of the district’s voters. NPA voters comprise almost 31% of the district, and Republicans comprise just under 30%.
A slight turnout differential could spell disaster for Frankel, who has been criticized for unethical conduct and is a face of Democratic party leadership that is too often pro-Hamas and anti-Israel.
There’s blood in the water, and a crowded field is fighting for the chance to unseat Frankel. Deb Adeimy is running again; she narrowly lost her primary in 2022 after the nominee, Dan Franzese, ran a series of hyper-negative ads on her in the waning weeks of the primary. Franzese got curb-stomped by Frankel in the general election, losing to Frankel 55.1% to 44.9%.
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Franzeze is also running again and has put another sizable wad of personal cash into this campaign, although he still has not paid off his campaign debt from the last campaign. Then there’s newcomer Andrew Gutmann, an economic refugee from New York who has received press for exposing woke lunatics in the school system. Gutmann has raised the most money and has both grassroots and donor support.
That’s probably why Dan Franzese has spent lots of time and campaign cash attacking Gutmann and trying to paint him as a New York liberal who doesn’t support Trump. With only about 11 weeks to go until the primary, everyone understands that a certain amount of political hyperbole is expected from all campaigns.
My colleague Tracy Caruso wrote about Franzese in Nov. of 2023.
However, the attacks on Gutmann just don’t hold water. Gutmann is a bona-fide conservative. He is a proponent of Milton Friedman’s economics and is definitely pro-Trump, pro-Wall, and a defender of our Constitutional rights. In addition, he has this incredible story about publicly challenging his daughter’s school’s attempt to indoctrinate their students in critical race theory and other woke ideologies. His actions helped spark the national parents’ rights movement, and Gutmann has been praised by noted national conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.
The question is whether Gutmann is the best candidate to defeat Lois Frankel. Deb Adeimy certainly has energy and grassroots credibility, and she’s a woman, but she hasn’t been able to keep up with Gutmann on fundraising, and let’s face it, if you can’t go the distance with money in this race, you can’t win. Gutmann, who is Jewish, could be the best fit to unseat Frankel based on the Democratic Party’s mishandling of the aftermath of the 10/7 attacks and campus protests and the now blatant anti-Semitism of a large number of Democrats. Only Gutmann is capable of messaging in that way, and he’s currently running a killer TV ad showing just how compromised the Democratic Party is with their pro-Hamas sympathies.
There is a strong base of Jewish voters among Democratic and Non-Partisan voters in CD 22. What Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have done with their pro-Palestinian/Hamas rhetoric and sympathies is alienating that Jewish base like never before. Gutmann is best positioned to take advantage of this rare opportunity when many moderate and right-leaning Jews are disgusted with the Democrat’s betrayal of Israel and American Jews.
Gutmann’s messaging seems to be working. We obtained a set of numbers leaked from a Gutmann Campaign donor that show Andrew Gutmann with a clear lead and Dan Franzese in third place.
There’s a long way to go in this primary, but Andrew Gutmann may be the giant killer we’ve been looking for.
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