For Indochinese, Political Stock Is Rising

‘Everyone . . . still has relatives back home. Many of us still have relatives in re-education camps. We believe if we vote, then we have some political clout. We will let officials know that we care.’

Orange County’s Indochinese community has become a small but significant force in politics here, local Republican and Democratic party leaders say.

And increasingly, they say, the county’s newest voters are registering Republican.

During the last two years, Republican Party officials have worked hard to tap the refugee communities in Westminster, Santa Ana and Garden Grove through voter-registration drives and the formation of a local Vietnamese-American Republican Club. They have also elected a Vietnamese-American to their central committee.

Those votes could pay off, Republican strategists believe, in next November’s race for the 72nd Assembly district seat now held by Richard Robinson (D-Garden Grove). Robinson announced Sunday that he will seek the Democratic nomination for the 38th congressional district seat now held by Robert K. Dornan, a Republican. In 1984, Robinson beat challenger Richard Longshore by 256 votes. If the 1986 election is also close, Republican leaders are hoping that Indochinese votes will swing it their way.

The Republican Party’s fiscal conservatism and its opposition to communism have strong appeal among the county’s 60,500 Indochinese who settled here after fleeing Communist regimes in Southeast Asia, said Christine Vu-Dinh, 40, an immigration consultant who 18 months ago founded the Vietnamese-American Republican Club of Orange County.

Ten years after Saigon fell to the Communists, many of the immigrants have become citizens, she said, and they are eager to vote.

“I tell you why they care,” Vu-Dinh said fiercely. “Everyone--every single one in the community--still has relatives back home. Many of us still have relatives in re-education camps. We believe if we vote, then we have some political clout. We will let officials know that we care.”

Local Democratic Party leaders agree that the Indochinese voters have become an important voting bloc.

Though they would like to conduct their own registration drive in that community, at the moment they don’t have the money for it, said Bruce W. Sumner, chairman of the Democratic Central Committee of Orange County.

“They (Indochinese) have a clout that’s in excess of their numbers,” he said. “The reason is--they actually turn out and vote.”

But Sumner disagrees that most Indochinese are destined to become Republicans. “One of the strong pitches made by the Republican side is to indicate they are more anti-Communist than the Democrats--which of course is hogwash,” he said.

“We’re convinced that once those people take a longer look at the issues, their natural home would be the Democratic Party,” Sumner said. “On the issues which they are most interested in--social issues like schools, public transportation, day care--they are on the Democratic side.”

Vu-Dinh and other Vietnamese leaders say the Democrats’ “social issues” have little appeal for former refugees who have built businesses in Orange County’s prospering “little Saigon,” a strip of markets, restaurants and small businesses along Bolsa Avenue in Garden Grove.

“We are American,” said Ha Van Phan, director of the Vietnamese League of Orange County, which offers job-training and health referrals to the community. “We want to contribute to this community. In the long run, most of the refugees, they don’t want to receive welfare.”

For now, anyway, the county’s Indochinese--80% of them Vietnamese, 11% Laotian and 9% Cambodian--seem to be registering Republican, party leaders and county registrar Alvin E. Olson say.

‘Mostly Asian’ Registrations

Olson said he doesn’t know precisely how many Indochinese residents have registered to vote or how many have registered Republican. But among new registrations last month, “mostly they were Asians,” he said. And when Olson inspected a random sample of 50 Asian registrations, 41 had registered Republican, five had registered as Democrats, three had declined to state a preference and one had registered with the Peace and Freedom party.

“It looks like the Republican Party has been doing some good, solid work” in the Indochinese community, Olson said.

In the first two weeks of November, when 38,500 immigrants became American citizens in mass ceremonies at the Los Angeles Convention Center, 40 Republican volunteers a day manned voter-registration tables outside.

Jim Wisley, executive director of the Southern California Democratic Party, admits that the Democrats were woefully outnumbered.

Reagan Was Attraction

“We had three or four tables to their 16 or 17 tables,” he said. “I watched them--not so much selling the Republican Party but all standing out there with pictures of Ronald Reagan on a horse, with a cowboy hat on. They (voters) were not only signing up for the Republican Party, they wanted to register with Ronald Reagan.”

And, Wisley said, “to be honest, I think the Republicans got the lion’s share.”

Dennis Catran, a local Republican Party vice chairman who handles voter “outreach” programs, agreed. He estimated that about 5,000 Indochinese in Orange County were registered Republicans in 1984. Now, because of the party’s “get-out-the-vote” effort, that number “has either doubled or tripled,” he said.

A few observers are skeptical of Indochinese residents’ newfound interest in politics.

“I don’t think they’ve surfaced yet,” said Mark Baldassare, a political science professor at UC Irvine. “Ninety-five percent of them have been here 10 years or less. . . . They’re very segregated socially and economically, and I don’t think they’ve become a part of the political process as of yet.”

‘Not Going to Diminish’

But Beverly Hunter-Curtis, refugee coordinator for Orange County’s Social Services Agency, disagreed. “We have sort of a nascent force at this point,” she said. “It’s not going to diminish. It’s going to be increasing.”

During the last two years, Hunter-Curtis said she has noticed “a real interest in learning how to be part of the system to the point where they’re participating in local and congressional campaigns . . . to the point where you see pictures in the (Vietnamese) newspapers of a campaign headquarters . . . and you do see Vietnamese faces in some of the campaigns.”

Vietnamese faces were part of the 1984 campaign when Dornan defeated Jerry Patterson, a Democrat, in the 38th Congressional District.

Vu-Dinh, a political novice, organized her Vietnamese-American Republican Club that July. Encouraged by a Republican Party worker, she invited 20 friends to her home in Villa Park. There were more meetings at private homes and eventually the club established a headquarters in a storefront on Bolsa Avenue. (Local businessmen--not the county Republican Party--paid more than $5,000 rent, Vu-Dinh said.)

Translated Materials

Club members also translated election materials into Vietnamese and registered 1,200 voters. They held a fund-raiser--an Oriental dinner with a Vietnamese cabaret band--that raised $9,000 for Dornan. And on Election Day, they ran a telephone bank in which 40 volunteers called Vietnamese voters, reminding them to vote and sometimes driving them to the polls.

Still, since most of these new Republicans had never voted before, they didn’t always understand what to do, Vu-Dinh and Catran said.

“The ballot was so complicated the last time. . . . When we were explaining the procedure, ‘You should vote for Ronald Reagan,’ they would all agree,” Catran said. “And then we’d get to (Republican congressional candidate Richard) Longshore, and we’d lose them.”

Catran and Vu-Dinh are hoping that, in 1986, Indochinese voters will be better able to cope with the voting process.

Meanwhile, since the 1984 election, the Vietnamese-American Republican Club has had a low profile. It gave up its Bolsa headquarters as well as most political work, Vu-Dinh said. Instead, the club has organized cultural events--an evening of Vietnamese dances and songs, a speech to 200 Vietnamese parents by U. S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett, a Tet dinner to celebrate the New Year.

Bloc Could Swing Vote

“We get involved in the big election, when there are issues dear to us,” Vu-Dinh said. “We’re just taking a little rest before ’86.” The club will become politically active again by summer, she promised.

Catran is counting on the club’s help next November. “In central Orange County, the two parties are so close in registration right now,” he said. “That particular bloc will swing it.”

While the Republicans have the lead at the moment, Yen Do, publisher of Nguoi Viet, the largest newspaper in the Vietnamese community, said it is still not clear whether the majority of the new voters will end up voting Republican.

“Last year was the first time the Vietnamese community was influenced by a political campaign,” he said. For the first time, he said, they faced “the very classical dilemma of the Vietnamese-American in this country: They feel more close to the Republican view but socially they are more Democratic.”

In the 1984 election, it was not that difficult to resolve the dilemma because “the machine of the Republican Party worked more harder than the Democratic,” he said.

But for the coming election, “now we work more. We understand more,” Do said.

“Maybe next election the Vietnamese-American will take it more seriously,” he said. “And it will be exciting to observe how the new citizens use the vote.”