Left: Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Calif.). Right: Democrat Derek Tran campaigning in Little Saigon.Mother Jones illustration; Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Zuma; Christina House/Los Angeles Times/Getty
“This Jay Chen for American Congress, he’s perfect for China,” one agent told his colleague in a smoke-filled room at the “Chinese Communist Party Intelligence Division.” Chen, the agent said in stereotypically accented English, was “a socialist comrade” who supported Bernie Sanders “for supreme leader.”
“Sanders loves Mao, Chen loves Sanders,” the other spy said, as the pair erupted in maniacal laughter.
The two men were actors in an advertisement for GOP Rep. Michelle Steel in her 2022 reelection fight against Chen in Southern California’s 45th Congressional District. Following a barrage of promotional material in this vein, groups from Asian American and Pacific Islander communities protested the tactics used by Steel, calling them “McCarthyist” and making signs reading “Stop Asian hate” and “Red-baiting is race-baiting.”
Steel, who is Korean American, won the race, taking 52 percent of the vote and helping Republicans narrowly seize control of the US House.
Politicized battles over Asian American identity have become a recurring feature of campaigns in the 45th—a wrench-shaped swing district that spans more than a dozen cities in Orange and Los Angeles counties. It’s one of the country’s few majority-minority congressional districts represented by a Republican, and Democrats see it as one of their top pickup opportunities as they try to retake the House in November. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up 39 percent of the district’s voting-age residents—the second highest in the state. Approximately half of the district’s Asian population is Vietnamese.
Democrats hope their challenger this time around—Derek Tran—will fare better than Chen. A US Army veteran and the son of refugees, Tran is leaning heavily into his anti-communist bona fides. “Derek’s family fled a murderous communist regime in Vietnam,” his campaign website notes. “He knows firsthand the devastating impact of totalitarian governments and is committed to standing firm against Chinese Communist rule.”
In an interview with Mother Jones, Chen expressed optimism that Tran’s biography would be a powerful tool in fighting back against Steel’s “red scare” tactics. “The fact that Derek is Vietnamese American will help him counter a lot of these attacks,” Chen predicted.
Chen—who is Taiwanese American—recalled that, in his own race two years ago, Republicans posted campaign signs reading “China’s Choice Jay Chen” and “made them resemble the Chinese flag.” Similar rhetoric was deployed in Vietnamese and featured the colors of the flag of South Vietnam, the US-backed country that ceased to exist in 1975 after it was defeated by communist forces at the end of the Vietnam War. “The bulk of its focus is on the Vietnamese community, and the symbolism that [Steel] includes—the red and the yellow—are meant to trigger an immigrant population, many of whom were refugees who were very traumatized by communism,” Chen said.
That’s happening again. Steel’s team has installed large signs invoking the South Vietnamese flag around the area’s Little Saigon community—across from a Costco popular with Vietnamese shoppers and at the entrance to a plaza of Vietnamese shops. “Đả Đảo Cộng Sản,” they read: “Down With Communism.”
The signs have caused some controversy. “To us, Steel is misusing the flag for her own political gain—the flag we so revere,” said Christina Dao, a host and commentator for Nguoi Viet Daily News in Little Saigon. “We would never put any political slogans or anyone’s names on the flag. Michelle Steel is not really a part of its history.”
In our conversation, Dao pointed to a Wall Street Journal report from 2020 that documented how Steel’s husband, Shawn Steel, who has served as the Republican National Committee member from California since 2008, invited Chinese nationals to a 2017 GOP event where attendees allegedly talked through campaign strategy. (Steel told the Journal that it would be “false, defamatory, and offensive” to suggest he’d helped Chinese government efforts in any way. He did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)
All this convinced Dao and other Vietnamese Americans in Little Saigon to form an unofficial group, start a petition on Change.org, and organize an online press conference to criticize Michelle Steel. The congresswoman is “abusing” the flag “to satisfy her greed for power,” the petition says.
In 1984, following the GOP’s national convention, Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential reelection campaign in Fountain Valley, part of today’s 45th District. “It’s nice to be in Orange County,” Reagan famously remarked, “where the good Republicans go to die.” At the time, the county was about 78 percent white and solidly conservative.
Since then, the region has grown in diversity and has slowly shifted toward the political center. A survey conducted earlier this year by the University of California, Irvine, concluded that the county is now “politically purple…almost evenly split among Republicans (32%), Democrats (33%), and Independents (35%).” Among Asian American respondents, the partisan divide is similar.
The common narrative is that the influx of immigrant communities made the county more ethnically and economically heterogeneous. This, along with the backlash to Republican support for California’s Proposition 187 in 1994—which ordered health care institutions and school districts to deny services to undocumented people—led to a decades-long political drift away from GOP hegemony. In 2018, bolstered by opposition to Donald Trump, Democrats won a clean sweep of all seven congressional seats in the county.
Viewing Orange County as purple is “dangerous for Democrats.”
But there’s no reason to think these changes are permanent. Republicans—including Steel—recaptured two of those House seats in 2020. And Gustavo Arellano, an author and columnist at the Los Angeles Times, warned this year that viewing Orange County as purple is “dangerous for Democrats,” as the GOP still dominates local politics. Republicans, he noted, “hold every countywide elected position and all the seats on the Orange County Board of Education…A majority of city councils in the county lean GOP.”
In 2018, Arellano credited the Republican Party as the “pioneer in diversifying O.C.’s politics,” listing notable Latino politicians who arrived in the region in the ’80s, including Tom Fuentes, a Mexican American who worked on Richard Nixon’s California gubernatorial campaign and later became the long-standing chair of the county GOP.
Now that Asian American Republicans have become a force in Orange County politics, Arellano argued, the GOP was constructing “a new racial cold war” through appeals to immigrants across the country who “come with skills and ambitions and don’t want government handouts.” In his view, the Republican Party was now drawing on anti-Latino feelings among other immigrant groups, resulting in support for policies like stronger borders.
“The countywide power held by [Republicans] reflects strong local mobilization efforts by the party,” said UC Irvine professor Long Bui, an expert on the politics of Vietnamese refugees, in an email interview. “Saying Orange County is increasingly Democratic due to a rise in immigrants overlooks nuances, especially when party affiliations among Vietnamese Americans split along generational, class, and educational lines.”
Survey data published last year shows that a narrow majority of Vietnamese Americans nationwide lean toward the Republican Party, a sharp contrast to other AAPI communities, which tend to heavily favor Democrats. According to Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, a professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, the political divides within the Vietnamese American community partly reflect several distinct groups of immigrants: refugees who left Vietnam at the end of the war in 1975; boat people who fled starting in the late ’70s; and later humanitarian and family reunification efforts.
While Nguyen-Vo stresses that many differences exist among individual voters, in general, those who immigrated in 1975—in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saigon—were mostly middle- and upper-class urban dwellers and tended to be more liberal than groups who arrived later. They opposed the communist regime, but they didn’t necessarily see anti-communism as incompatible with Democratic policies like progressive income tax rates and a more generous social safety net.
Vietnamese boat people and other groups who fled after 1975 are more “staunchly anti-communist and pro-American,” according to Nguyen-Vo. Before leaving Vietnam, she notes, these families lived through “extreme economic hardship, partly due to the American embargo and socialist reorganization…and outright repression including incarceration in prisons and reeducation camps.”
“Many died or disappeared due to boat wrecks, lack of fuel, food and water, and encounters with pirates,” explains Nguyen-Vo. “These folks languished in refugee camps for long years awaiting countries to grant asylum.” Once in the US, boat people often had a tougher time financially than earlier Vietnamese immigrants and may support policies like lowering taxes and restricting immigration, believing they will help them reach economic stability or advancement. “However, they tend to favor social programs like health care and social assistance, as many had depended on these programs at some point,” Nguyen-Vo suggested. “They may equate being anti-communist and conservative with the GOP and vote red, but they would still want their GOP representatives to support social programs.”
Culture war issues have become a particular flashpoint. Lance Trover, a spokesperson for Steel, cited the Republican lawmaker’s work in introducing the Helping Applications Receive Valid and Reasonable Decisions (HARVARD) Act to “stop racial discrimination in university admissions that has been proven to specifically target Asian Americans”—the subject of last year’s Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action policies.
Trover also noted Steel’s efforts to highlight “Vietnamese communist human rights abuses.” In a July 2024 interview with VietFaceTV, a Vietnamese-language television station based in the district, Steel voiced her concerns with the Vietnamese government’s treatment of prisoners of conscience. She also noted her support for a bipartisan bill that would prevent Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the United States prior to 1995 from being deported.
Both candidates have leaned heavily on their families’ immigration experiences. “To forge the American Dream in California,” Tran said over email, “I know that what this community wants more than anything is someone who will protect individual freedom, fight for economic opportunity, and address the affordability crisis that is hurting families.” In May, Tran sparked his own controversy when he told Punchbowl News that although Steel presents herself as a Korean refugee who fled communism, she actually moved to the US for “economic gain.”
“That’s not the same as losing one’s country after the fall of Saigon in ’75 and having no home,” he said.
“There are people in the community who are tired of this continued conversation about identity.”
Dozens of AAPI organizations and community leaders came to Steel’s defense, insisting that Tran apologize for his statement. “Mr. Tran, starting a new life and working to attain a better economic state is the American Dream that so many of us or our parents have done,” they wrote. “It’s why we are here, and why we love representing the diverse groups in our communities.” (Most of the individuals who signed the statement are listed on Steel’s campaign website as having endorsed her.)
Of course, Tran isn’t the only candidate trying to draw distinctions between different groups of immigrants. “You regularly see [Steel] and Young Kim [a Korean American Republican representing a neighboring congressional district] talking about how, Oh, I came here legally to pursue the American Dream. But it’s the undocumented who are making it worse for everyone,” said Chen.
Hao Phan, the Southeast Asia curator at Northern Illinois University, thinks that such rhetoric could resonate with voters. “Vietnamese Americans are concerned about the issue of illegal immigration,” he says. “Although Vietnamese are immigrants, they tend to see themselves as good immigrants in contrast to the bad immigrants.”
Some voters are growing frustrated with the increasingly bitter identity politics. “This new political dimension has created a painful rift within the community, which used to be united around the identity of a community of refugees…against the communist regime in Vietnam,” says Phan.
Jeanie Le, a board member with the Orange County Young Democrats, says she appreciates the importance of ethnic background and the history of AAPI identity. But, she adds, “there are people in the community who are tired of this continued conversation about identity…People who are here are worried about if their kid is going to school and how they’re going to pay rent.” She called out Steel’s red-baiting in particular: “A lot of Vietnamese people are really tired of it because it makes the community seem monolithic.”
Le sees the battles over AAPI identity as misguided distractions from the more immediate concrete problems facing the district, including the soaring cost of living. She praised Kim B. Nguyen-Penaloza—a Garden Grove City Council member who lost the March primary to Tran by a couple hundred votes—for her work leading the city’s mobile mental health program for the unhoused. She also highlighted Thai Viet Phan, a council member from nearby Santa Ana, for her support of a local law that limits rent increases to 3 percent per year.
“There’s so much happening in our community, and I just really want to make sure that when people write about this community, they reflect that,” Le told me. “It’s a lot more complex than a lot of people try to make it out to be.”
Update: This story previously noted that Le told Mother Jones that the OC Young Democrats weren’t fully backing a candidate in the California 45th congressional race. After that interview, but before this story was published, the group endorsed Tran. The story has also been updated to note that most of the signatories on a letter critical of Tran have endorsed Steel.
