A recent solemn reunion in Orange County brought together dozens of other Vietnamese Americans formerly held at Suoi Mau prison, where dissidents and U.S. allies were incarcerated after the fall of Saigon.

In a sea of ​​gray hair and faded military uniforms, one young face stood out: Derek Tran, a 43-year-old Democrat running for Congress.

The 45th Congressional District has the largest population of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam, but has never had Vietnamese Americans represented in Washington.

Democrats are hoping Ms. Tran can buck that trend as she seeks to win over Republican Rep. Michelle Steele, 69, a powerful fundraiser with deep ties to the Orange County GOP, and to capture the support of Vietnamese voters, many of whom have been loyal to the party since the 1980s.

The November election is one of a handful across the country that both parties see as crucial in determining the balance of power in the next Congress.

“We will always remember our elders who did so much for us,” Tran, who was born in the United States to Vietnamese refugee parents, told Congress after the reunion with former political prisoners.

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 serves on the board of directors for the Consumer Lawyers Association of California and is a transportation commissioner for the City of Orange.

In the March primary, Tran beat Garden Grove City Councilman Kim Nguyen Penaloza by 367 votes, coming in second to Steele. Over $2.2 million Since entering the race in October 2023, its fundraising has surpassed Steele.

Tran said he was pleased that Vietnamese Americans “finally have a candidate who can represent us,” and that their support has energized his campaign. He said some conservative voters have been touched by Tran's family history and military service. Tran spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserves and served on active duty with the Homeland Security Corps at Fort Stewart in Georgia in 2003.

“There will be MAGA (far-right Vietnamese Republicans) out there, but you can't change their mind,” Tran said, driving between campaign stops. “But there are Trump supporters who will vote for the lower-ranking Democratic candidate.” Tran said an older Vietnamese American voter told him, “I've lived in this country for over 30 years, and I've never voted for a Democrat. You're the first person to vote for me.”

Sarah Lin, who works on Asian American outreach and mobilization for the Democratic House Campaign Committee, said Vietnamese voters, and Asian voters more broadly, are “a critical part of our path to victory in this district.”

Tran faces a tough race against two-term incumbent Steele, who won about 55% of the vote in the primary. Born to Korean parents and raised in Japan, Steele broke barriers by becoming one of three Korean American women elected to the House of Representatives in 2020.

Steele campaign officials have questioned whether Tran can win a significant share of Vietnamese voters, and said their own analysis of primary precinct data showed Steele received more votes in heavily Vietnamese areas of the district than Tran and Nguyen Peñaloza combined.

A third of the district's voters are Asian American, and half of them are Vietnamese.

Steele's campaign and Republicans who support her candidacy argue that who voters support is far more complicated than a shared ethnic identity or family history. They say voters will turn to Steele, a candidate they know and trust, to solve the nation's broken economy.

State Assemblywoman Tri Tha (R-Westminster), the first Vietnamese mayor of Westminster, home to Little Saigon, said Vietnamese American voters in particular “need to know who's in that position.” She said Steele's reelection would be a “great success” because he has “been involved in the community for over 20 years.”

Before joining Congress, Steele represented the area for more than a decade on the Orange County Board of Supervisors and the Board of Equalization, the state board that oversees taxation. Steele is married to Shawn Steele, a former chairman of the California Republican Party. Steele said the couple have worked for years to help elect Vietnamese American Republicans in California.

This was the first presidential election in which Orange County's Vietnamese community was largely in the same district, a deliberate decision by California's Independent Redistricting Commission, said Sara Sadhwani, an assistant professor of political science at Pomona College who served on the commission as a Democrat.

Sadhwani said she expects Steele to have a classic incumbency advantage given Vietnamese Americans' track record of supporting Republicans, but she said there is “a younger generation of Vietnamese Americans who aren't as attracted to the status quo of the Republican Party.”

As for Tran's chances of winning, Sadhwani said that while there are exceptions, surveys generally show that “ethnicity and shared identity between candidate and voter tend to matter” across most racial groups in the U.S.

In 2022, Steele's House campaign faced criticism over ads that portrayed his opponent, Taiwanese-American Jay Chen, as a pawn of Communist China.

Steele has spoken frequently about the threat of communism and has drawn attention to the Vietnamese government's treatment of political prisoners, but her campaign is focusing on issues close to home because voters often tell her about “inflation, gas prices and, especially in California, crime,” she said.

At Steele's campaign headquarters in a high-rise outdoor mall in Buena Park, a few dozen volunteers gathered early on a cloudy Saturday morning for coffee, mochi doughnuts and a refresher on voter outreach.

The campaign has made more than 250,000 phone calls and 100,000 door-to-door visits this year, focusing on hands-on activities. Approximately $6.3 millionThat includes $910,000 in personal loans, and he now has more than $4 million in cash — three times as much as Tran. It could cost more than $5 million to run a successful House campaign in the expensive Southern California media market.

According to the California Secretary of State's office, Democrats hold a 4.3 percentage point advantage in registered voters in the 45th District, but that margin has narrowed slightly over the past two years as Republicans pushed for more voter registration.

The majority-Asian district is one of the few minority-majority districts not represented by a Democrat. Most precincts in Westminster and Garden Grove supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. The area has since shifted to the right, with most voters backing former President Trump in 2020 and again in this year's primary, according to voter data.

Republican Andy Pham, exiting a Westminster pharmacy, said he plans to vote for Steele, citing rising prices of all kinds as his biggest challenge, and that he likes Steele's campaign poster that reads, “Stop Inflation, Lower Taxes.”

Steele's Vietnamese sign bears a different message: “Đả đảo cộng sản,” which translates to “Down with Communism.”

“It's the right message,” said Pham, who said she liked the idea of ​​a congressional candidate from a refugee family but had not heard of Tran before the election and is generally skeptical of Democrats.

Over a lunch of pork belly banh mi and sugarcane juice in Westminster, Garden Grove resident Jackie Conley, who fled Vietnam as a teenager, said seeing a refugee child running for Congress gave her hope.

She said she hadn't decided whether to vote for Tran, but she works in health care and likes her focus on reducing the affordable cost of health care. Getting her family to vote for Tran was another story. “Half my family is Republican, and that's hard to change.”

Neither candidate lives in the district — Tran lives in Orange and Steele in Seal Beach.

Tran criticized Steele as “too extreme” for Orange County, pointing to his questioning of mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic and his decision to co-sponsor an anti-abortion bill in the Assembly. Her name was removed She withdrew from the bill two months after signing it, saying she did not want her support to be interpreted as a lack of support for IVF.

Republicans say Tran has never held public office and lacks the experience to be a member of Congress, and while Democrats say she is fluent in Vietnamese, she has used an interpreter and spoken in English in interviews with Vietnamese media.

About 7% of voters in the district received ballots printed in Vietnamese, according to research firm Political Data.

Tran said Vietnamese was her native language but she lost the fluency she had as a child, and while she can understand much of what is said to her, she uses an interpreter “so that I don't have to lose my ability to communicate what I want to say in my broken Vietnamese.”

Tran said Vietnamese elders have told him they appreciate his efforts.