By Dr. Julie Martinez Ortega

*Incumbent* Michelle Park Steel (R) and Derek Tran (D)

This week we’re looking at the CA-45 race in Southern California between Republican incumbent Michelle Steel and her Democratic challenger Derek Tran. This is considered one of the most hotly contested races nationally. The district includes parts of Orange County as well as a small part of Los Angeles County and is home to one of the nation’s highest concentrations of Asian Americans.

Largest Vietnamese population outside Vietnam

CA-45’s boundaries were drawn to provide Asian American voters the ability to elect a representative of their choosing. It includes the nation’s largest Vietnamese American community and is centered around Orange County’s Little Saigon, which has the largest concentration of people of Vietnamese descent outside Vietnam.

The API community comprises the largest share of the electorate in the CA-45 at 39%. The Vietnamese American community is a strong force within the greater API community making up 16% of the district’s voters. The next largest group in the electorate is whites at 33%.

CA-45 REGISTERED TO VOTE, BY RACE

Voters supported Biden over Trump by 6 points

The CA-45 is one of the 18 congressional districts in the nation where the voters supported Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020 (by 6 points) yet chose a Republican candidate as their representative in Congress. And registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in the CA-45 by 5.7 points. Democrats comprise 37.8% of all the registered voters in the district while 32.6% are Republicans and 24% are no-party-preference voters. Nonetheless, in 2022, Steel managed to beat Democratic nominee Taiwanese American Jay Chen by over 10,000 votes.

Steel vs Tran: Korean American Republican vs Vietnamese American Democrat

CA-45 2022 BALLOTS CAST, BY RACE

Michelle Steel is a Seoul-born Korean American who has been active in Republican Party politics for over two decades. She was elected to Congress in 2020 and survived her first reelection campaign in 2022 in a closely contested battle with Jay Chen (Steel won with 52.4% of the vote).

Steel has been an outspoken opponent of reproductive choice, opposing abortion and supporting the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs that left abortion access up to the states. She is a co-sponsor of the Life at Conception Act, which declares that human life begins at the moment of fertilization. Steel has been a strong fundraiser and has consistently reported large contributions in each filing period.

Derek Tran, a child of Vietnamese refugees, speaks openly about the important role that government programs and community support played in his family’s ability to achieve their American Dream. Tran is a first-time candidate and enlisted in the Army out of high school, eventually becoming an attorney specializing in discrimination and personal injury cases. Fluent in Vietnamese, Tran is able to communicate directly with many in the CA-45’s Vietnamese electorate. Tran entered the primary months later than his fellow Democratic congressional candidates but prevailed to become one of the two House candidates in this race whose names will be on the ballot in November.

Not afraid to throw mud

In the 2022 election, Steel distributed flyers in the district depicting her Democratic opponent Chen as a communist sympathizer despite his service in the U.S. Navy and that Chen’s grandmother fled China to escape communist rule. Given Steel’s demonstrated willingness to throw mud to see what will stick, we might see similar below-the-belt antics as she faces off against Tran, the son of Vietnamese refugees who fled communism.

Complex racial dynamics

This race has tricky racial dynamics. As in 2022, both candidates on the November ballot will be API, requiring Steel and Tran to convince the API voters in the district that they are the API candidate who best represents the needs of the API community.

The API voters within the CA-45 have a turnout rate of 45%, meaning that 45% of the registered API voters actually cast a ballot in 2022. Given that APIs comprise the largest share of the eligible voters, we’d expect them to have cast the most ballots in the 2022 election. However, ballots cast by API voters only comprised 32% of all votes cast compared to 46% by whites. Whites were able to exert a disproportionate impact on the electoral outcome in the CA-45 given that they are only 33% of the eligible voters. *Native Americans comprise of only 56 people registered to vote in the district.

How Dems can avoid repeat of 2022: turning out Latino voters

Tran will have to contest for every API vote in the district, building on his base within his own Vietnamese community to avoid the same fate as Chen’s in 2022. But Tran could also focus on improving turnout among Latino voters in the district who may be even more likely than API voters to support the Democratic candidate. The district’s 95,639 registered Latinos comprise almost a quarter of its registered voters, yet Latinos only cast 34,961 (16%) of the ballots in 2022. In other words, two out of three registered Latinos (about 60,000!) stayed home in 2022 when the election’s outcome was decided by only about 10,000 votes. Tran would do well to target these Dem-friendly Latino voters in November for GOTV.

Two Asian Americans Vie for House Seat in Orange County, CA That Includes Little Saigon