Democrats press for congressional seats in once-red Orange county: ‘If we sit on our asses, we lose’

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/31/election-orange-county-california

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The once solidly Republican bastion in southern California is up for grabs, and Democrats are campaigning hard

In an industrial business park in Orange county – the affluent, largely suburban slice of southern California wedged between Los Angeles and San Diego – Dave Min was feeling the weight of the world last weekend.

“If we sit on our asses for the next 10 days, we lose,” the Democratic candidate for California’s 47th congressional district told a roomful of Asian American supporters at his campaign headquarters. “We need to get out that vote.”

Earlier in the day, with former president Bill Clinton standing next to him, Min spelled out the stakes to a noisy crowd of about 200 volunteers about to spread out and canvass for him. “America is under greater threat to our most cherished values than at any time in our lifetimes,” he told them gravely. “And control of Congress could depend on who wins this particular district.”

That claim was no exaggeration. As Democrats vie to overturn the Republicans’ four-seat majority in the House of Representatives – a vital backstop, as they see it, if they should lose the White House to Donald Trump – their chances hinge on a number of highly competitive California districts, three of them in Orange county.

Once a bastion of Reagan Republicanism, the county has edged towards the centre-left as its population has grown more ethnically diverse and a crucial percentage of Republican voters – college-educated women, in particular – have grown disgusted with Trump and his Maga movement.

Just how far, and how reliably, the county has moved will be put to the test on 5 November, following a campaign in which both parties have sunk tens of millions of dollars and bombarded the airwaves and people’s mailboxes with a toxic brew of attack ads invoking everything from the Chinese Communist party to pedophilia.

Min, a Korean American law professor who has a solid legislative record in California’s state senate, is fighting to fill a seat being vacated by Katie Porter, the outspoken Democratic party populist and prolific fundraiser who ran for the US Senate but fell short in the March primary against her House colleague Adam Schiff.

Inland from Porter’s coastal district, Derek Tran is hoping to become the first Vietnamese American member of Congress, in an area with the largest ethnic Vietnamese population outside Vietnam. To succeed, he will have to unseat Michelle Steel, a powerful, well-funded Republican incumbent with deep roots in county politics and who, as a Korean American, has her own Asian bona fides.

To the south of both districts, the incumbent Democrat, Mike Levin, is facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from Matt Gunderson, a wealthy car dealer who previously ran for office in Wisconsin.

Opinion polls in all three districts have been volatile. Levin’s campaign manager, Adam Berkowitz, described his race as a “pollercoaster” – recent surveys have put Levin anywhere from 12 points to just a single percentage point ahead – and he said he expected the determining factor not to be overall voting preferences so much as the ability of each party to turn out its supporters.

For the Democrats to succeed, they will need to depend on three key, overlapping groups: Asian Americans, who see an opportunity to flex their political muscles in two of the three districts; female voters alarmed at the prospect of a national abortion ban if Republicans take both chambers of Congress and the White House; and moderate Republicans (many of them now former Republicans) appalled by the fealty of all three GOP congressional candidates to Donald Trump and everything he stands for.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have done their best to talk about anything but abortion – their candidates have twisted themselves into pretzels claiming to be more moderate on the issue than their past stances would suggest – and are betting that well-to-do Orange county residents will see more opportunities to increase their wealth if Republicans take charge in Washington.

That bet is causing particular heartburn for politically engaged women who have abandoned the GOP and wish they could convince more of their wealthy suburban friends to do likewise. “It’s all about what Republican voters think he [Trump] will bring to the table so they can save a buck or two on their taxes,” former Republican turned Democratic party fundraiser Katherine Amoukhteh said. “They’ve decided that leaving millions to their kids is more important than climate change.”

Not everyone, though, thinks the choice is quite so transactional, or so cut and dried. Liz Dorn Parker, another former Republican who supervises endorsements for Women for American Values and Ethics (Wave), a non-partisan Orange county political action committee, believes the threat to reproductive rights is a powerful motivator for female voters – whether or not they admit it publicly, or tell their husbands.

“You’ve got to imagine some of these older Republican women, many of them divorced or widowed,” Parker said, painting with a deliberately broad brush. “All their money is tied to housing, and, yes, they’re worried about the Democrats being communists. But they’re also looking at their granddaughters and asking, what if they get raped? The issue is freaking people out in ways that the men just don’t understand.”

An immigrant community eyes alternatives

As the races come into the home stretch, the Democrats are cautiously confident that Tran can unseat Steel, following a bruising campaign in which Steel’s team has tried to make political hay out of everything from the clients Tran took on as a consumer rights lawyer to his investments in cryptocurrencies which, they say, link him to Chinese Communist party, a reliable bogeyman in Orange county, especially among Vietnamese American voters.

A Steel spokesperson described Tran as “a sleazy trial lawyer” and offered a statement to the Guardian, reflecting the overall tone, accusing him of making a fortune “working for sexual predators, filing frivolous lawsuits, discrediting the victims and blaming the women”.

Tran has not shied away from calling Steel a “Trump lackey” and a “complete fraud” for withdrawing her support for the strict anti-abortion Life at Conception Act, a bill she previously co-sponsored.

Still, Tran’s campaign says the relentless, often baseless attacks against him are a sign of Steel’s nervousness, in a district where Democrats hold a five-point registration edge and the most recent internal polling put him a few points ahead. Tran’s candidacy has generated genuine excitement in Little Saigon, a staunchly conservative area in northern Orange county at the centre of Steel’s C-shaped district, where Tran campaign signs are now prominent even among the names of other much more conservative candidates for local office.

That alone is striking, since most Vietnamese immigrants to the United States fled during the fall of Saigon in 1975 and have translated their native anticommunism into staunchly Republican politics that they have passed down to their children and grandchildren.

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“This all boils down to the fact that this community has never had representation from one of its own in the 49-plus years they’ve been in this country,” Tran said in an interview. “For many seniors, I’m the first Democrat they’ve ever voted for. They’re putting heritage over party lines, and that’s exactly what we want them to do.”

The Democrats are further encouraged that Steel’s policy positions are too far to the right for her voters. One of her congressional allies is Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose support for Steel’s re-election proved so awkward that Steel opted not to cash a check the showboating congresswoman wrote. They also say Steel has a reputation for spending little time in her district and offering little in the way of constituent services. Her campaign did not respond to several invitations to comment.

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Some of Steel’s attacks on Tran have arguably pushed the bounds of believability, including one recent television appearance in which she said: “I think I am more Vietnamese than my opponent.”

A bruising contest for a vacated seat

Min almost certainly faces a tougher challenge than Tran, even though his Republican opponent, Scott Baugh, has run for Congress twice before and was embroiled in an election fraud scheme 28 years ago that resulted in a large civil fine.

Several activists who might otherwise have offered full-throated support to Min were dismayed when Porter walked away from the seat, seeing the decision as close to a betrayal, and were dismayed all over again when Min ran a negative and highly personal primary campaign to defeat his leading challenger. That, local political operatives say, has significantly eaten into Min’s ability to mount an effective grassroots campaign.

In addition, Min was arrested for driving under the influence last year, prompting calls across the political spectrum for him to drop out of the race. The episode has left him with the unfortunate nickname “DUI Dave”, which the Republicans have gleefully propagated.

Min has called the DUI his “biggest mistake”.

He has plenty of strengths as a candidate – he appears smart and well-spoken on the stump, and centrist enough to have won the endorsement of law enforcement organisations that typically lean Republican. But Baugh has run a strong campaign of his own, coming across in television appearances as affable and relatively moderate by Trump-era Republican standards.

Min appeared energised last weekend when Bill Clinton and a cohort of elected Democrats from around the country turned up in his district for the final campaign push, and the school gymnasium where he fired up his volunteers did not lack enthusiasm. “Min for the Win,” their T-shirts read, and they cheered on every one of his campaign lines.

But Min himself acknowledged in an interview that he hadn’t talked to as many voters as he would have liked and had had to rely on TV ads and other forms of mass communication in the absence of a robust local media. “When I go on TV, a lot of people don’t know me,” he said.

Parker, the Wave endorsement manager, acknowledged that bad blood among Democrats had hurt Min especially since he had a steep hill to climb to match Porter’s name recognition. “People are mad at Dave … People got personally hurt,” she said. “My answer to that is: ‘This is politics, people. Grow up.’ Whoever wins, you’ve got to work for. You gotta keep the seat blue.”

A more liberal area, but also more polarised

Working hard has not been a problem for Mike Levin, whose district straddles the most conservative areas of Orange county – including San Clemente, seat of Richard Nixon’s “western White House” – and more liberal beach cities north of San Diego.

Levin has made re-election look relatively easy since he first won the seat in 2018, thanks to a ground operation that has grown with each passing election cycle. This year, an early canvassing operation over the spring and summer reached an unprecedented 80,000 voters. After two months of follow-up phone-banking work, his campaign is now sending canvassers back out to make sure people are filling out their ballots and returning them correctly. “We’re hitting 2,000 houses a day, seven days a week,” one of his field officers, Gene Larson, reported.

In all three districts, Democrats are betting that this is no longer “your father’s Orange county”, as Min described it, meaning it is now more diverse and more liberal. But the area is also more polarised and, in some quarters, more extreme than it was a generation ago.

Porter’s district includes Huntington Beach, a city so radical it has banned books in its libraries, refused to fly a Pride flag outside its city hall and adopted its own local anti-immigration agenda. Min said the city had “weaponised its school districts into bastions of hate”.

Are the county’s ranks of Latinos, Asians and the well-educated – the “diploma divide”, as it is known – enough to offset such experiments in Maga Republicanism? Many of the Democrats who flooded into Orange county to support their candidates last weekend are counting on it, and are looking to Asian voters, in particular, to make the crucial difference.

“We are going from being marginalised,” Representative Judy Chu of Los Angeles said, “to being the margin of victory.”

Bill Clinton, for one, did not want to contemplate a world in which that prediction was wrong. “It’ll be almost impossible for us to win a House majority,” he said, “if we don’t win these … seats in southern California.”