At a solemn reunion in Orange County recently, dozens of older Vietnamese Americans gathered to reconnect with others who were once imprisoned at Suối Máu, a camp where dissidents and American allies were held after the fall of Saigon.
In the sea of gray hair and faded military uniforms, one younger face stood out: 43-year-old Derek Tran, a Democrat running for Congress.
The 45th Congressional District has the largest population of people of Vietnamese descent outside of Vietnam, but has never had a Vietnamese American representative in Washington.
Democrats are hoping Tran can buck that trend. To defeat Republican Rep. Michelle Steel, 69, a formidable fundraiser with deep ties to the Orange County GOP, Tran is trying to win over Vietnamese voters, many of whom have been loyal Republicans since the 1980s.
The November election is one of the few elections in the US that is seen by both parties as crucial for control of the next Congress.
After the reunion of former political prisoners, Tran, who was born in the US to Vietnamese refugees, said that in Congress he would “always remember our elders, who did so much for us.”
Tran, an attorney, grew up in the San Gabriel Valley and moved to Orange County in 2012, where he and his wife opened a pharmacy in Anaheim. He serves on the board of directors of the Consumer Attorneys Assn. of California and is a traffic commissioner for the city of Orange.
In the March primary, Tran defeated Garden Grove City Councilwoman Kim Nguyen-Penaloza by 367 votes, finishing second to Steel. He has raised more than $2.2 million since entering the race in October 2023, and raised more than Steel last quarter.
Tran said his campaign has been supported by Vietnamese Americans who are happy to have a candidate who “can finally represent us.” He said some conservative voters have been influenced by his family’s story and his military service; he served eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve, including a stint on active duty in 2003 with a homeland security unit at Ft. Stewart, Georgia.
“There’s going to be MAGA, far-right Vietnamese Republicans, who, you know, we’re not going to change their minds,” Tran said as he drove between campaign stops. “But I have Trump supporters who will vote for me, vote for a Democrat.” He said older Vietnamese American voters have told him that “in the 30-plus years we’ve been here in this country, we’ve never voted for a Democrat — you’re the first one we’ve ever voted for.”
Vietnamese voters, and Asian voters in general, are “a critical part of the path to victory in this district,” said Sarah Lin, who works on Asian American voter mobilization and outreach for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Tran faces stiff competition from Steel, a two-term incumbent who won nearly 55% of the vote in the primary. Born to South Korean parents and raised in Japan, Steel broke barriers in 2020 when she became one of three Korean-American women elected to the House of Representatives.
Steel campaign officials doubt that Tran can win a significant percentage of Vietnamese voters. They say their own analysis of constituency data shows that Steel won more votes in the most Vietnamese-denominated areas of the district than Tran and Nguyen-Penaloza combined.
A third of the district’s voters are Asian American, and half of those are of Vietnamese descent.
Who voters support is far more complex than shared ethnic identity or family history, Steel’s campaign and Republicans backing her candidacy have argued. To fix America’s broken economy, they say, voters will choose Steel, the candidate they know and trust.
Vietnamese-American voters in particular “need to know the person in the office,” said state Assemblywoman Tri Ta (R-Westminster), who was the first Vietnamese mayor of Westminster, home to Little Saigon. He said Steel would be re-elected “greatly” because she “has been in the community for over 20 years.”
Before Steel served in Congress, she represented the area for more than a decade on the Orange County Board of Supervisors and on the Board of Equalization, the state panel that oversees taxes. Steel is married to Shawn Steel, the former chairman of the California Republican Party. She said the couple worked for years to get Vietnamese American Republicans elected in California.
This is the first presidential election in which Orange County’s Vietnamese community is largely in the same congressional district. That was a deliberate decision by California’s independent redistricting commission, said Sara Sadhwani, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College who served on the panel as a Democrat.
Sadhwani said she expects Steel to have the classic incumbency advantage, particularly given the Vietnamese community’s track record of supporting the Republican Party. But, she said, “there’s a younger generation of Vietnamese Americans who are less enamored with what the Republican Party has become.”
As for Trans’s chances, Sadhwani said there are exceptions, but that research generally shows that for most racial groups in America, “ethnicity and the shared identity between candidates and voters does matter.”
In 2022, Steele’s campaign for Congress was criticized for ads that portrayed her Taiwanese American opponent Jay Chen as a tool of communist China.
Steel speaks often about the threat of communism and has also called attention to the Vietnamese government’s treatment of political prisoners. But, she said, her campaign focuses on kitchen-table issues because that’s what she hears from voters: “Inflation, gas prices … and especially in California, crime.”
On a cloudy Saturday morning, dozens of volunteers gathered at Steel’s election headquarters, in a multi-story shopping mall in Buena Park, for coffee, mochi donuts and a refresher course on voter engagement.
The campaign said it has focused heavily on its ground game, making more than 250,000 phone calls this year and knocking on more than 100,000 doors. Steel has raised nearly $6.3 million, including $910,000 in personal loans, and now has more than $4 million on hand, a war chest three times larger than Tran’s. A successful House campaign in the expensive Southern California media market could cost more than $5 million.
According to the California Secretary of State, Democrats have a 4.3 percentage point registration lead in the 45th District, but the gap has narrowed slightly in the past two years as Republicans look to register more voters.
The district, which is majority Asian, is one of the few minority-majority districts in Congress that is not represented by a Democrat. Most precincts in Westminster and Garden Grove supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. The area has since moved right, overwhelmingly backing former President Trump in 2020 and again in this year’s primaries, voter data shows.
As he walked out of a Westminster pharmacy, Republican Andy Pham said he planned to vote for Steel. He said his biggest issue is the rising cost of everything, and he likes Steel’s campaign signs, which read, “Stop inflation, cut taxes.”
Steel’s Vietnamese signs carry a different message: “Đả đảo cộng sản,” which literally means “Down with Communism.”
“That’s the right message,” Pham said. He said he liked the idea of a congressional candidate who comes from a refugee family, but said he had never heard of Tran before the election and is generally skeptical of Democrats.
Over a lunch of pork belly banh mi and cane juice in Westminster, Jackie Conley, a Garden Grove resident who fled Vietnam as a teenager, said seeing the refugee’s daughter run for Congress has given her hope.
It wasn’t a given that she would vote for Tran, she said, but she works in health care and likes his focus on making medical care more affordable. Getting her family to vote for Tran, she said, is another story: “Half of them are Republican, and that’s hard to change.”
Neither candidate lives in the district; Tran lives in Orange and Steel lives in Seal Beach.
Tran criticized Steel for being too “extreme” for Orange County, citing her questioning of mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic and her decision to co-sponsor an anti-abortion bill in Congress. (Steel removed her name from the bill two months after signing it, saying she didn’t want her support to be perceived as a lack of support for in vitro fertilization.)
Republicans have called Tran, who has never held elected office, too inexperienced for Congress. They have also said that while the Democratic Party has described Tran as fluent in Vietnamese, he uses an interpreter and speaks English in interviews with Vietnamese media.
According to research firm Political Data Inc., about 7% of voters in the district receive a ballot printed in Vietnamese.
Tran said Vietnamese was his first language, but he has lost his childhood fluency. He understands most of what is said to him, he said, but uses a translator “because I don’t want my messages to be lost because of my broken Vietnamese.”
Tran said Vietnamese elders have let him know they appreciate his efforts.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
