For the second time in this election cycle, State Rep. Gayle Harrell is taking on a much richer opponent for the remaining two years of outgoing Senate President Joe Negron’s term.
The special election for State Senate District 25, which includes large slices of Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties, pits Republican Harrell against Stuart doctor Rob Levy, a multi-millionaire Bentley-driving Democrat and political novice who had no opponent in last month’s primaries.
Harrell did have an opponent, and a fierce one that Harrell even accused of trying to buy the election.
She beat Trumper Belinda Keiser, as in Keiser University, who spent whopping $1 million on trying to take out Harrell.
With just north of $200,000 in her war chest, Harrell’s message to voters focused on her experience in political office, including eight terms at the State House, and pointed out that Keiser may have been a Democrat in Republican’s clothing who donated tens of thousands to the likes of Pres. Bill Clinton, Al Gore and former Democratic National Committee boss Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
There was also the matter of Keiser moving to Stuart from Broward County on time to qualify for the election.
The 75-year-old Harrell has been living in the area for 47 years and sat in the State House from 2000 to 2008, and 2010 until now.
She’s mostly known for championing the issue of the opioid crisis and co-sponsoring the Legacy Florida Bill with Negron, legislation that’s supposed to sink $4 billion into Everglades Restoration.
With Rob Levy as opponent in the general election, Harrell is now going head-to-head will a well-known local doctor who claims in state elections forms a net worth of $10.9 million.
Levy is a Democrat who appears to have the spending habits and political contributions of a dyed-in-the-wool Republican.
Levy, 63, cites clean air and clean water as his issues. Yet, state records show, he owns not just one but two gas-guzzling, polluting Bentley Continentals.
And Levy flies back and forth to his $1.8 million-historic carriage house in Aspen, Colo.
Levy also owns two adjacent residential properties on Stuart’s NW Pine Tree Way worth a combined $2.1 million and two commercial properties: One on the beachfront of Cocoa Beach worth $2 million and a medical office worth $2.7 million in Nacogdoches, Texas, according to Levy’s state elections financial documents.
In the total $185,000 he has raised for the race so far, Levy loaned his campaign $150,000 from his personal accounts.
A dad of three children and three stepchildren, Levy may be tougher to beat than Keiser.
While his pockets may not be as deep as Keiser’s, he has lived in the area since the early 1980s and started a successful medical practice in Port St. Lucie, Family Care Association.
It was eventually sold to Martin Health System and, according to Levy’s biography on his campaign website, he has since then invested in real estate and volunteered his time at Volunteers In Medicine, a Stuart clinic that offers free health care to those with no insurance.
Mom-of-four Harrell, meanwhile, listed a net worth of $2 million, including a $900,000-house on Eagle Point in Stuart and another $900,000 in stocks, municipal bonds and money market funds.
Come Nov. 6, however, Levy and Harrell will stand before the great wealth equalizer: the voters.