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Even today, State Representative Randy Fine calls his opponent Dr. Marcie Adkins irrelevant and not a serious candidate. He has stated this in several interviews as one of the reasons he refuses to debate her. “I’m not remotely worried, she’s irrelevant.”
His campaign finances tell another story.
Since May 1, 2020 when Dr. Adkins announced her candidacy, Fine has spent $141,143 campaigning against her according to his own campaign finance reports. To put that into perspective, every other sitting State Rep in Brevard County has spent a COMBINED total of $87,593.
District 50’s Rene Palencia has spent $20,832. District 51 Tyler Sirois has spent $20,672. District 52 Thad Altman has spent $46,089. Fine has spent $141,143. That is a total on $53,550 more than everyone else combined. That seems pretty relevant.
Fine has also been critical of how much Adkins pays her campaign consultant Robert Burns‘ firm The Relentless Group for his services at $4,000 per month. Just last week fine paid his consultants’ firm Strategic Management run by Anthony Pedicini $57,858. Pedicini is known state-wide for his negative mailers, which voters have complained about receiving from Fine almost daily in the last week. He recently had to settle a lawsuit from another candidate who sued him for defamation. Fine has paid Pedicini a total of $129,918 since May this year.
To put that spending into perspective, US Congressman Bill Posey, whose district covers all of Brevard County, Indian River County, and part of Orange County has paid his consulting firm Data Management a total of $147,007. That’s only $5,864 more than Fine has spent on the opponent he says he isn’t worried about.
Finally, in a last ditch effort to sway voters and deny reality, Fine posted an article from Florida Politics who he pays for favorable articles, stating they paid for a poll showing that Fine is ahead of Adkins by 37 points. However, the poll from a company out of St. Pete does not even state whether the poll was conducted in his district.
Curiously when you click on the link within the article for the poll, it takes you to a website that shows the company has not actually conducted a poll since 2016.
Further the legitimacy of any of the ‘polls’ conducted from this organization are in question, as they are almost exclusively conducted by clients of Pedicini and the owner of the blog, Florida Politics, which Fine paid for this article.
A quick look at their twitter page shows mostly retweets from Randy Fine and Florida Politics owner Peter Schorsch.
Schorsch has a lengthy criminal past, as reported before for extorting candidates and elected officials for favorable articles and plead guilty for stealing funds from campaign finances of other clients.
According to an article from the Tampa Bay Times, in 2003, Schorsch had a falling out with Jack Hebert of the Mallard Group, his employer at the time.In 2003, Schorsch had a falling out with the firm’s founder and principal, Jack Hebert. The disagreement stemmed at least partly from Schorsch’s decision to date Hebert’s high school daughter, Schorsch said.
The details of the article paint a very ugly picture.
Fine has made countless accusations against Dr. Adkins’ consultant without providing any proof to his claims. His advisors records however are readily available, and reflect a long history of true transgressions.
Fine has not been able to gain the endorsement of a single elected official in Brevard County since gaining an opponent. Adkins, on the other hand, has gained several.
Fine has lashed out at nearly every Republican leader in the area to include even yesterday, Chair of the Republican Liberty Caucus, and 3rd place gubernatorial candidate Bob White, publicly calling him a whore, repeatedly from his official Facebook page.
Between Fine’s consultants of Pedicini and Peter, we have seen what they have come known for. We anticipate on Monday, the day before election day, to see a full blitz of negativity. To quote Pedicini himself, “negativity works.”
Tuesday night at 7pm, we shall see who it worked for.