At a solemn gathering in Orange County, dozens of elderly Vietnamese Americans recently gathered to reconnect with others who were once held at Suối Máu, a camp where American dissidents and allies were imprisoned after the fall of Saigon.
In the sea of gray hair and faded military uniforms, one younger face stood out: Derek Tran, 43, a Democrat running for Congress.
The 45th Congressional District has the largest population of Vietnamese descent outside of Vietnam, but has never had a Vietnamese American representative in Washington.
Democrats are hoping Tran can turn that tide. To beat Republican Rep. Michelle Steel, 69, a formidable fundraiser with deep ties to the Orange County GOP, Tran is pushing to win over Vietnamese voters, many of whom have been loyal Republicans since the 1980s.
The November election is one of several across the United States that both parties view as crucial to determining control of the next Congress.
Following the meeting of former political prisoners, Tran — who was born in the United States 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 is a board member of the Consumer Attorneys Association of California and 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 behind Steel. She has raised more than $2.2 million since filing for the race in October 2023 and outraised Steel in the fourth quarter.
Tran said his campaign has been buoyed by Vietnamese Americans who are thrilled to have a candidate who “can finally represent us.” He said some conservative voters have been swayed by his family history and his military service; he spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve, including a stint on active duty in 2003 at a national security detachment at Ft. Stewart, Georgia.
“There will be far-right Vietnamese Republicans who support MAGA and 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 over a lower-ranking Democrat.” He said some older Vietnamese American voters had told him that “in the 30-plus years we’ve been in this country, we’ve never voted for a Democrat; you’re the first one we 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 outreach and mobilization for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Tran faces stiff competition from Steel, a two-term incumbent who received 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 have questioned whether Tran can win a significant percentage of Vietnamese voters, saying their own analysis of primary precinct data showed Steel received more votes in the district's most heavily Vietnamese-populated areas than Tran and Nguyen-Penaloza combined.
One-third of the district's voters are Asian-American and half of them are of Vietnamese descent.
Voters' choice is far more complex than shared ethnic identity or family history, Steel's campaign and the Republicans backing her candidacy argue. To address the crisis in the U.S. economy, they say, voters will support Steel, the candidate they know and trust.
Vietnamese American voters, in particular, “need to know the person who is in office,” said state Assemblyman Tri Ta (R-Westminster), who was the first Vietnamese mayor of Westminster, where Little Saigon is located. He said Steel would be re-elected “by a long shot” because “she has been in the community for over 20 years.”
Before Steel was in Congress, she represented the area for more than a decade on the Orange County Board of Supervisors and the Board of Equalization, the state panel that oversees taxes. Steel is married to Shawn Steel, former chairman of the California Republican Party. She said the couple has worked for years to help elect Vietnamese American Republicans in California.
Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Seal Beach) gathers interns and campaign volunteers at her campaign headquarters in Buena Park before a day of door-to-door canvassing.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
This is the first presidential election in which Orange County’s Vietnamese community has been overwhelmingly in the same voting district. That was an intentional decision by California’s independent redistricting commission, said Sara Sadhwani, an adjunct professor of politics at Pomona College who served on the panel as a Democrat.
Sadhwani said he expects Steel to have the classic advantage of incumbency, particularly given the Vietnamese community’s record of support for the Republican Party. But, he said, “there is a younger generation of Vietnamese Americans who are less enthralled with what the Republican Party has become.”
As for Tran's chances, Sadhwani said, there are exceptions, but research generally shows that across most racial groups in the United States, “ethnicity and shared identity between candidates and voters tend to matter.”
In 2022, Steel's campaign for Congress faced criticism for ads portraying his Taiwanese-American opponent Jay Chen as a tool of communist China.
Steel speaks frequently about the threat of communism and has also drawn attention to the Vietnamese government’s treatment of political prisoners. But, he said, his campaign is focused on everyday issues, because that’s what he hears from voters: “Inflation, gas prices … and, especially in California, crime.”
At Steel's election headquarters, located in a multi-story outdoor mall in Buena Park, dozens of volunteers gathered early on an overcast Saturday to drink coffee, eat mochi doughnuts and brush up on voter outreach skills.
The campaign said it has focused heavily on its work on the ground, 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 Southern California’s expensive media market can cost more than $5 million.
Democrats hold a 4.3 percentage point registration advantage in District 45, but the gap has narrowed slightly over the past two years as Republicans have pushed to register more voters, according to California's secretary of state.
The district, which is majority Asian, is one of the few minority-majority districts in Congress not represented by a Democrat. Most of the Westminster and Garden Grove districts supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. Since then, the area has shifted to the right. In 2020, and again in this year’s primaries, a majority voted for former President Trump, voter data shows.
As he left a pharmacy in Westminster, Republican Andy Pham said he planned to vote for Steel. He said his main problem is the rising cost of everything and that he likes Steel's campaign signs, which read: “Stop inflation, lower taxes.”
Steel’s posters in Vietnamese have a different message: “Đả đảo cộng sản,” which translates to “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 sugar cane juice in Westminster, Jackie Conley, a Garden Grove resident who fled Vietnam as a teenager, said watching the son of refugees run for Congress has given her hope.
It wasn't clear he would vote for Tran, he said, but he works in health care and likes her goal of making health care more affordable. Getting his family to vote for Tran, he said, has been another story: “Half of them are Republicans, and that's hard to change.”
Neither candidate lives in the district; Tran lives in Orange and Steel lives in Seal Beach.
Tran has criticized Steel for being too “extreme” for Orange County, pointing to 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 did not want her support to be construed as a lack of support for in vitro fertilization.)
Republicans have said Tran, who has never held elected office, is too inexperienced for Congress. They have also said that while the Democratic Party has said Tran is fluent in Vietnamese, she uses an interpreter and speaks English in interviews with Vietnamese media.
About 7% of voters in the district receive ballots printed in Vietnamese, according to research firm Political Data Inc.
Tran said Vietnamese was his first language, but he has lost the fluency he had as a child. He understands most of what is said to him, but uses a translator “because I don't want my poor Vietnamese to get lost in my messages.”
Elderly Vietnamese people, Tran said, have told him they appreciate his efforts.
