Vietnamese Jumping GOP’s Ship

A political shift is underway in Orange County’s large and traditionally conservative Vietnamese American community, where the GOP’s longtime dominance is being eroded by a rise in Democratic voter registration.

For the first time, the Democratic Party this election year registered more new voters than the Republicans. The GOP, which once enjoyed a 4-1 registration margin over Democrats in Little Saigon, has seen its lead steadily shrink over the last eight years.

Republicans can now claim the allegiance of 39% of all Vietnamese voters, compared with 33% for Democrats, according to an analysis of official election records. Eight years ago, the Republicans had 58%.

Experts and community leaders said the changing party loyalties suggest that the Vietnamese in Little Saigon--and especially older residents--are becoming more concerned about issues such as Medicare, Social Security and programs for the poor.

“When the Vietnamese first arrived in Orange County, they came as the victims of communism,” said Cal State Fullerton professor Jeffrey Brody. “Republicans had the staunchest anti-Communist position. So the Vietnamese and the Republicans embraced each other because of the Republican foreign policy agenda.”

But as hopes dimmed that they would ever reclaim their homeland from the Communists, Brody says, the Vietnamese became more concerned with domestic issues. “They saw that they stood a better chance of getting programs that would help their community from the Democrats rather than the Republicans,” he said.

GOP officials are hopeful that they will soon be able to shore up party support among the Vietnamese American community’s 55,000 voters; they assert that the recent decline in registration has less to do with ideology than the effect of a two-term Democratic president who visited California 50 times.

Tom Fuentes, the longtime GOP chairman of Orange County, said the election of Republican George W. Bush should halt the slide.

“Now we have the tools in our arsenal . . . to produce a president, or a visitor of that rank and prestige to . . . reach out at the grass-roots level,” he said.

Indeed, several new Vietnamese American voters who registered Democratic this year said they did so because they believe they have prospered under President Clinton’s leadership.

Katherine Do of Anaheim arrived in Orange County from Vietnam in 1992. Two years later, she became pregnant with her second child, a son, and her medical bills rocketed to $22,000 after surgery--bills that were eventually paid by MediCal.

Her son has benefited too. Thanks largely to education policies she attributes to the Democrats, his elementary school class shrank from 32 kids to 16.

“I saw that my son was getting more individualized attention from his teacher,” said Do, 42, who is a classroom volunteer.

Another new Democrat, Anh Tran, 43, of Santa Ana, said she made her party affiliation choice based more on bread-and-butter issues than America’s foreign policies.

She said she picked the Democratic Party because her husband was laid off three times during former President Bush’s term. But under Clinton, her husband has been working at the same job for seven years, the couple bought their first home and their college-age sons are hopping from one part-time job to the next.

Grass-Roots Activism Helps Lead Shift

The movement in party allegiance during the Clinton administration has been steady. When he was elected in 1992, Vietnamese American Republicans outnumbered their Democratic counterparts nearly 3 to 1 (18,327 to 6,833). Today the numbers stand at 21,570 Republicans and 18,064 Democrats--a spread of only 3,506. An additional 15,347 Vietnamese Americans are registered as independents.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Little Saigon was considered a bastion of conservative Republicanism. The area of Westminster and Garden Grove became a settling ground for emigrants from communist Vietnam, and many residents embraced right-wing politicians such as former Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), who represented the district for years.

But as the Cold War ended, a new generation of more moderate community activists emerged.

Brody and other outside experts say the boost in Democratic fortunes is due in part to the grass-roots activism of Mai Cong, the founder of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County. She stunned many in the nation’s largest Vietnamese emigrant community by co-chairing a 1992 Clinton-Gore committee in Little Saigon.

Mai and her husband, Dinh Le, a former Vietnamese Army officer who founded the Vietnamese-American Phoenix Democratic Club, can chuckle today over the community’s shock when they began actively campaigning for the Democratic presidential ticket. They said they even endured death threats from extremists in the community back in 1992.

“Since then, the Vietnamese community has changed, and changed drastically, from being almost 90-something percent Republican to the point where today we [Democrats and Republicans] are almost even,” she said. “And if you consider the independents, most of them are people who used to be Republican and are now moving more to the center.”

Mai’s organization operates a low-cost health clinic, a senior center, and several counseling programs for Vietnamese immigrants and refugees in offices it has built in Santa Ana, Westminster and Garden Grove.

In the three months leading up to this year’s election, the group launched a get-out-the-vote campaign in Little Saigon, and also distributed about 4,000 voter registration cards. Because of the organization’s nonprofit status, it does not urge registrants to join one party or another.

Dinh believes that many immigrants first questioned their allegiance to the Republicans in 1995, when the GOP-controlled House proposed a law denying benefits to all immigrants until they had been in the country at least five years.

“[That] literally drove some people here in the Vietnamese community to become Democrats,” Dinh said. “That was [a] real watershed event.”

He said the proposal happened to coincide with the arrival of the first wave of political detainees, the former South Vietnamese military officers and government officials who had been imprisoned in labor camps since the war’s end more than 15 years earlier.

“The refugees who were just then coming, they needed help. Without some help from the government, from American taxpayers, it would have been disastrous. They couldn’t have survived,” Dinh said.

The law was eventually softened during negotiations over the Balanced Budget Act, clearing the way for the former detainees to receive temporary financial aid.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove), who defeated Dornan in 1996, said the Democratic Party really began to turn the corner in the Vietnamese community two years ago, when Gray Davis was running for governor.

“We did a heavy campaign for Davis, who’s a Vietnam vet,” Sanchez said. “And he was running against Dan Lundgren, who had opposed giving reparations to the Japanese interned during World War II. So we concentrated on the Asian community, and here that means Little Saigon.”

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Despite the Democratic gains, many Vietnamese Americans remain fiercely loyal to the Republican Party.

Nhi Ho of Westminster, who has been a Republican since he became a citizen in 1984, said the GOP best reflects his values on issues such as abortion and gay rights.

“Family values for the Vietnamese people are very important,” said Ho, a community activist.

Minh-Uyen Ngo, a Tustin attorney and former Democrat who switched to support Republicans this election year, said she was swayed in part by President-elect Bush’s proposed tax cut.

“It’s time to focus on our lives, and we need the tax cuts that the Republicans offer,” Ngo said.

Also contributing to this story was Dick Lewis, a political consultant based in Newport Beach.

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Vietnamese Move Away From GOP

Democrats are increasingly narrowing the lead Republicans hold among Orange County’s 55,000 Vietnamese American registered voters.

Source: OC Elections Department

Researched by RAY F. HERNDON / Los Angeles Times