Adams, Sandy, 1956-

Sandra Adams (born December 14, 1956) is an American law enforcement official and politician. A member of the Republican Party, she served as the U.S. Representative for Florida's 24th congressional district from 2011 to 2013.

Born Sandra Kay Daniels into a Navy family in Wyandotte, Michigan, her family settled in Florida after her father's retrirement from the Navy in 1964. She attended high school in Florida but dropped out at 17 to join the United States Air Force, serving from 1974 to 1975. In the service, she met and married her first husband. Earning a high school equivalency degree in 1983, she began working in the Orange County, Florida sheriff’s department 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, the year after earning a BA from Columbia College’s satellite campus in Orlando, Florida, majoring in criminal justice administration. 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.

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 narrowly won the primary with 30 percent of the vote, largely due to the endorsement of the small-government Tea Party movement. In a wave year for Republicans, Adams defeated Kosmas with 60 percent of the vote.

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. She played a prominent role during the second session when she introduced a bill to renew the Violence Against Women Act for another five years. 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.

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. Adams announced her candidacy for the 2016 Republican primary in Florida's 6th congressional district, but she withdrew from the race in January 2016 due to health issues.