Democrats’ fate lies in the nation’s political battlefield: Orange County

Instead of running in the more conservative, coastal district where she won in 2020, Steel is now running in the 45th Congressional District, where Democrats have a 5-point registration advantage.

But Steel’s campaign is confident, largely because Little Saigon boosts her district’s Asian American slice of the electorate to 35%. Vietnamese voters were an integral part of the coalition that helped carry Steel to victory in 2020 over incumbent Democrat Harley Rouda, who is white, said Fred Whitaker, chair of the Orange County Republican Party.

“That’s why Michelle Steel moved over (to run in that district), because that was one of her strongest bases,” Whitaker told me. “The party registration may be a little more Democratic, but the way that they vote is Republican.”

The Republican National Committee took notice and last June opened an office in a strip mall in the heart of the community to try to strengthen its ties there. Since then, the GOP has knocked on 75,000 doors and made 200,000 calls in the Steel’s new turf, according to GOP officials.

Steel visited the storefront recently during a training for volunteers to make calls in Vietnamese. Strung across one wall is a 12-foot-long banner featuring a quote attributed to her: “I live in the best country on Earth and I want future generations to achieve their own American Dreams.”

“We’re going to win,” Steel told the dozen volunteers at the training. “No matter what.”

Long Bui, a professor of global and international studies at UC Irvine, said Vietnamese American businesses and voters “will be key to determining who wins this race.”

Their voting patterns, however, aren’t predictable.

Bui, the author of “Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory,” said there’s “a tendency” to think that older Vietnamese — particularly those who fled the Communist takeover of their homeland after the war ended — vote more conservatively than the younger generation.

Instead, Bui said, “the community often considers personalities and who runs the most savvy, impactful campaign. Issues and charisma matter as much or sometimes more than party affiliation.”

Diedre Tu-La Nguyen, the mayor pro-tem of Garden Grove, which is part of Little Saigon, said the Vietnamese community is still small enough that personal relationships often trump party affiliation. The Vietnam-born Democrat, who fled a refugee camp as a child after the war and is now a cancer researcher, is running for Assembly.

“Vietnamese don’t vote for a party, they vote for people,” Nguyen told me over dinner of sea snails, garlic noodles and grilled shrimp at a Little Saigon restaurant. She said that until she ran for office, many didn’t know she was a Democrat. “You just know who people are in the community by their reputation, by what they’ve done.”

In a sign of how unpredictable voters are here, even Nguyen’s household is split. Nguyen’s husband is a Republican.

Steel’s main opponent is Jay Chen, a child of Taiwanese immigrants, U.S. Naval Reserve officer, school board member and owner of a real estate firm.

Chen is a better fit for the new district, which “is more working class,” said Ajay Mohan, executive director of the Orange County Democratic Party. Democrats intend to pound Steel for not supporting the federal Paycheck Protection Plan that provided funding to the small businesses that drive the community.

They say Steel — a fervent Trump supporter who received a 77% rating by the Conservative Political Action Committee scorecard (slightly higher than House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield) — is too conservative for the newly drawn district.

Perhaps even more damaging, Chen said, is that she voted against establishing the commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection and against the bipartisan $1.9 trillion American Recovery Plan last year.

Steel said the plan was too pricey and sprawling.

“Our infrastructure used to be just roads, services, waterways, bridges, but the federal government wants to spend on electric cars and charging stations,” Steel told me. “When you have money to buy a Ford, you cannot do Mercedes work.”

Meanwhile, Kim is facing a challenge from two Republicans who aren’t raising much money and a Democrat, Asif Mahmood, a Pakistan-born physician who ran (briefly) for lieutenant governor in 2018 before jumping into the state insurance commissioner race. He lost in the primary.

During his 2018 race, Mahmood — who has never held elective office — introduced himself as a “triple threat” to then-President Trump: a Muslim, an immigrant and a Californian. It was an attempt to capture the zeitgeist when Trump was a human get-out-the-vote machine for Democrats, who leveraged that antipathy to retake the House and two years later, the presidency.

Now, Mahmood is taking on Kim in the redrawn 40th Congressional District. But Trump isn’t on the ballot and Democrats don’t intend to focus on him as much.

“The issues that move working-class voters the most are pocketbook issues,” Mohan, the Democratic Party leader said. “Not to say that Trump undermining American democracy is not important. … But when talking about voters, that’s what we’ve got to focus on.”

Kim touted that while she supported Trump’s economic policies, she pushed back when he described COVID in racist terms like “the Kung flu” — words that contributed to a huge spike in violence against Asian Americans — by calling his comments “hurtful” on social media.

“Words spoken by the leader of our country have consequences,” Kim told me. “I’m not afraid to stand up when I hear words spoken by the leader that I felt were very insensitive.” Kim’s new district is 16% Asian American and 18% Latino, and Republicans hold a 6-point advantage in voter registration. While analysts believe that Kim is the favorite, Mahmood believes the race is close. So close that on one recent day, Mahmood drove 30 minutes into the sparsely populated, scrubby canyon lands of eastern Orange County to talk with eight potential supporters at the Silverado Canyon Community Center. It was his second visit to the area.

Linda May, a longtime Orange County grassroots activist, was there. She is a big fan of Rep. Katie Porter, the outspoken Democrat who represented the area after she flipped the seat in 2018 and has become a rising star in Washington for her interrogations of corporate leaders. But after redistricting, Porter is now running in a different district.

May said her first reaction after hearing that Mahmood was running “was that he’s wealthy. He’s a doctor. He’s a man. What’s he going to know about my life?”

But she became a fan after Mahmood visited her in this remote part of the county — and listened.

“He’s the kind of personality that I want in a politician but you don’t usually get: He’s not a scene-stealer. He’s a listener.” May said. “Look at the way he’s listening to everyone here.”

Clad in a black V-neck sweater and slacks, Mahmood quietly talked to each person at the community center, listening to their concerns about the wildfires, floods and blackouts that have plagued the area.

Mahmood wants to bring a physician’s perspective on health care to Capitol Hill. He questioned why Kim recently opposed a measure that would have capped monthly insulin costs at $35.

“Somebody doesn’t need to be a doctor (to understand this), but somebody needs to be sensitive,” Mahmood told me, attributing GOP opposition to the power of the pharmaceutical industry. “This is a life and death issue for a patient.”

Kim countered that Mahmood “was just toeing the party line.”

“People need to understand to do that their premiums will go up because somebody has to pay for it,” Kim told me.

Mahmood said he plans to focus on abortion rights, with the expectation that the Supreme Court will overturn the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision — perhaps just after California’s June 7 primary. Both Kim and Steel oppose abortion rights.

Mohan, the executive director of the Orange County Democratic Party, said “suburban women in Orange County — who changed the face of our country in 2018, and led the push to elect folks like Katie Porter — will be incensed at Roe being overturned.”

But others say that’s less of a sure thing in parts of Orange County. Like Little Saigon.

Part of the reason is that “many older Vietnamese are Catholics” and support the church’s opposition to abortion, said Democrat Phu Do Nguyen, a Little Saigon attorney and ex-Republican who emigrated from Vietnam as a refugee in 1980 when he was 14.

The biggest factor in these races may revolve around COVID — and how the parties and candidates react to another potential surge.

Four years ago, Orange County Democrats, backed by activists visiting from progressive parts of the state such as the Bay Area, conducted the most extensive door-to-door campaigning in their history. Democrats flipped four Orange County-based House seats.

But the Democrats largely shut down their field program after the pandemic struck in 2020 in the interest of not further spreading the virus. Republicans kept their field program largely intact. Republicans took two of those seats back, with Steel wining by only 2%, or 8,376 votes.

With the pandemic waning for now, Democrats are ramping their field program back up, said Ada Briceño, chair of the Orange County Democratic Party, which she said will make a “tremendous, tremendous difference.”

“I’ve always been of the opinion that we can’t win,” Briceño said, “unless we knock on those doors.”