The Race To Oust The Only Orange County Democrat in Congress

For 14 years people in Central Orange County have had to put up with a Democrat congressperson, but they may finally get some relief:

Republicans are on the hunt this fall for seats in Congress, and they smell blood in what may seem at first to be an unlikely place: the Democratic donut hole of central Orange County.

Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez has held sway there for nearly 14 years, easily dispatching a series of lackluster Republican opponents for more than a decade. She's the daughter of immigrants in an immigrant district, a Democrat with an easy advantage in money and registered voters.

But her opponent this year is a political patriarch of the very Vietnamese community that Sanchez has worked to win over. Republican Assemblyman Van Tran hopes to ride the same tide of voter discontent that national Republicans think will put Congress in their hands this November.

Polls and pundits give Sanchez the edge, but many put Tran within striking distance. The chairman of the Republican National Committee called the race a "top 10" for the party at a campaign stop for Tran last week. For her part, Sanchez is bringing in former President Bill Clinton to stump for her on Friday.

"I think this is going to be a hard fight, and it's going to be a lot closer than anybody thinks," said Adam Probolsky, a Republican political consultant. "We've got a real race on our hands."

The district at stake in this race covers Santa Ana and Garden Grove and parts of Anaheim and Fullerton. It's a donut hole of Democrat blue on a Congressional map of Orange County that is otherwise all Republican red.

Sanchez wrested the seat from conservative stalwart "B-1 Bob" Dornan in 1996. She prides herself on spending weekends in the district, not in D.C. – greeting supporters in Spanish or shaking hands at Vietnamese festivals. Her voting record has received high grades from environmental, education and veterans groups but low scores from business groups.

The article says Sanchez "wrested" the seat from B-1 Bob, but "stole" would be a better description . There were all kinds of voting irregularities that year that were very suspicious.

The Vietnamese community in Central Orange County is very big, and the Vietnamese business community operates a tremendous number of small business firms of all types. There's not much love lost between the Vietnamese groups and the Hispanic groups. Neither are fans of the other, and with Republicans very motivated to vote this year, we can only hope Tran can generate enough votes to defeat Sanchez and the people who will be cheating on her behalf.