Why did Vietnamese voters in Orange County swing toward Trump in 2020?

Few places in Orange County saw a bigger political flip last year, from Democrat to Republican, than a dense neighborhood along Brookhurst Street, near the heart of Little Saigon.

While Asian American voters nationwide have for decades tended to vote Democrat, Vietnamese American voters – in Orange County and elsewhere – have, for a confluence of historical and cultural reasons, long leaned to the right.

But until last year there were signs that was changing. In recent years, younger Vietnamese Americans were registering as Democrats. And, in 2016, the precinct along Brookhurst Street voted overwhelmingly (68% to 27%) for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, and a lot of other Vietnamese American neighborhoods followed suit.

Then something happened. Over the next four years, even as Orange County voters in general and Asian Americans nationwide grew more opposed to Trump, the local Vietnamese American community rallied around the outspoken president. And in November, 53% of voters in this Little Saigon neighborhood backed Trump while 47% supported Joe Biden.

The election caused palpable divisions in Little Saigon, where cafes are abundant and talk of politics is the norm, even when it is socially distant.

“This time around it was really intense, especially in this town,” said Roxanne Chow, a long-time community activist and former Westminster planning commissioner.

“We have people who are strong supporters of Biden and Harris. And then we’ve got people who are very loyal to Trump. For many years, they were all good friends. But they would get into these very heated debates,” Chow said.

“You could feel the tension.”

Local Democrats are blaming a misinformation campaign on the right for the Vietnamese community’s swing toward Trump. They’re also acknowledging they haven’t done enough to reach the local Vietnamese community, with party leaders launching a new effort to bridge that gap.

Republicans insist the switch was simple political expression and GOP values are better aligned with the Vietnamese community.

Regardless, there’s now a clear divide between generations, with a power struggle underway to decide whether, going forward, younger Vietnamese Americans will lean toward Republicans or Democrats.

“I really feel that we’re on the cusp of a pivotal point in the Vietnamese community, where the elders are wiling to pass the torch to us because they have to,” said Julie Diep, 44, of Garden Grove.”

The question is, which one of us is going to be trusted with that legacy?”

History and culture at play

When Frank Jao arrived in Orange County at age 27 in 1975, he landed in GOP land. Orange County was the birthplace of Richard Nixon and the ideological birthplace of the John Birch Society. The county was, as President Reagan would later joke, the place “good Republicans go before they die.”

“Orange County was heavily Republican. And as a new guy, you just go with the party,” Jao, now 74, said.

He was among the 50,000 Vietnamese processed through Camp Pendleton following the communist takeover of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. A second wave of Vietnamese immigrants came in 1979, with the arrival of “Boat People” fleeing communist Vietnam. Over the years, many more followed.

The community created a thriving business district along Bolsa Avenue in Westminster, the largest “Little Saigon” outside of Vietnam. Today, Orange County is home for about 204,000 people who were born in Vietnam or who are of Vietnamese decent, with large pockets in Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Fountain Valley.

Jao went from refugee to businessman, helping to mold the thriving Little Saigon district. His company, Bridgecreek Group, developed and owns more than 1,000 properties.

The Republican Party, he said, represents ideals that gel with the Vietnamese community: family, patriotism, entrepreneurship and self-reliance. The GOP, he believes, also opposes communism and government interference.

Westminster Mayor Tri Ta, who arrived in the U.S. at age 19 in 1992, cited similar policies that drew him to register as a Republican shortly after he became a citizen in 1999.

“I believe in Republican principles like being a conservative, really promoting family values, free enterprise, less government control and freedom for everyone, for every individual.”

Ta, who became the first Vietnamese American elected mayor of any American city in 2012, said many Vietnamese also view the Republican party as more patriotic and supportive of the military, which they credit with their freedom.

Since the wave of Vietnamese immigrants came as refugees fleeing Communism, that first generation saw themselves as distinct from other immigrant groups. So Jao said some Democratic talking points – including what he dubbed to be a push for “open borders” – were, politically, “suicidal” for voters in his community.

“To many Vietnamese, if you open borders, it’s like leaving your front door open at night when you go to sleep.”

Generational gaps grow

That early allegiance to the Republican party has largely stuck for that first generation of Vietnamese immigrants. Nearly 68% of local Vietnamese voters 50 and older were registered as Republicans on Election Day, according to figures from Political Data Inc.

While Ta acknowledges that much has changed in recent years, he said he believes the core principals of the Republican party have held fast.

But Vietnamese immigrants who arrived as young children, and second- and third-generation Vietnamese Americans, aren’t sticking to the pattern.

More than 65% of Vietnamese age 49 and under in Orange County were registered as Democrats as of Election Day, per Political Data Inc.

Local Vietnamese Republicans point out this trend isn’t unique to their community. Ta cited a longtime adage that all younger people tend to be liberal but become more conservative once they grow up, buy homes, have kids and start paying taxes.

But local Vietnamese Democrats say they simply don’t support the policies and ideologies that drew their parents and grandparents to the Republican party – even if they haven’t been vocal about it.

“As younger individuals in the community, culturally, we’re asked to respect our elders even though their visions and voting stance are so much different than ours,” said Diep, who five years ago registered as a Democrat.

She said she ran into younger Vietnamese Americans at Trump rallies last fall, looking bashful. Some told her their parents had brought them. And she’s heard that local Vietnamese sometimes even vote as a family, filling out ballots and sending them in together.

Diep was just 5 years old when her parents left Vietnam on a boat in 1981. She doesn’t recall being stranded with no food or water, or of life in a refugee camp in the Philippines before her parents made it to Southern California.

“My mother said to me, ‘You’re in a new country. You learn to speak the language and you become successful,’” Diep recalls. So until she was 30, when her mother passed away, Diep said she never spoke a word of Vietnamese.

She believes the generational gap so often cited for the divide among Vietnamese voters is really more about a language divide and access to information.

Since the younger generation can largely read and speak English, she said they can access more objective sources of information from a variety of sources to fact check what they hear or see on social media. The older generation, she added, is more likely to hear anecdotal information from friends or to get all of their news from thriving and (in her view) right-leaning Vietnamese language media outlets.

Some of those Vietnamese language media outlets repeated false talking points, according to Long Bui, an international studies professor at UC Irvine who has written about Vietnamese American anticommunist work and intergenerational differences in relation to homeland politics. Those generational differences, he said, include belief in claims that China created the coronavirus to bring down Trump and a smear campaign message that implied Biden did not support refugee resettlement.

Santa Ana Councilwoman Thai Viet Phan, a Democrat, said the local community relied on translations in Vietnamese language media from Fox News and other conservative media.

“My perception of why Trump did better in 2020 was the constant disinformation campaign,” she said. “If you say it enough, whether it’s true or not, people will hear it. And repeat it.”

As with other communities of voters, Diep and Bui said financial status also plays a role in how local Vietnamese Americans vote. Those who own local restaurants and grocery stores are frustrated over high taxes and COVID-19 shutdowns, so they’re more likely to vote Republican. But the employees who work in those same businesses have no healthcare or paid sick days, so they lean toward Democrats who promise to ease those struggles.

Immigration status and sexual orientation also play a role in whether Vietnamese Americans are more likely to vote Republican or Democrat, Bui noted.

With all of those groups growing and getting more vocal, Vietnamese American voters in Orange County and beyond had started to trend further to the left.

Then came the 2020 election.

China drives swing to Trump

Map how Little Saigon voted in the 2016 presidential election, and the result is solid blue. Recreate the map in 2020, and it becomes solid red, with some of the darkest patches of red in all of Orange County which, overall, favored Biden (54%) over Trump (44%).

Vietnamese voters were accustomed to polished politicians who were politically correct and diplomatic, Ta said, so in 2016 they leaned toward Hillary Clinton. But after seeing Trump in action for four years, Ta said he noticed a major swing in the Vietnamese community.

He cited Trump’s tax plan and other economic policies. But he and many others said the shift could be summed up in one word: China.

“I think that policy is really, really what made a majority of the Vietnamese first generation Americans vote for (Trump),” Ta said. “He had really strong anti-Communist China policy.”

China controlled Vietnam for centuries, and the two nations continue to clash over issues such as borders and natural resources. So Bui said many Vietnamese were swayed to vote for Trump after watching him wage a trade war with China that offered potential benefits for Vietnam.

“There are a lot of things they may not like about him, but they weigh it with what is important to them,” Chow said. “He’s not afraid to criticize China and say it like it is. That’s why many of our elders support Trump.”

That lingering anti-China sentiment in the Vietnamese community is one reason many say Trump’s use of terms such as “China virus” didn’t upset some in the Vietnamese community the same way it upset many other Asian Americans.

Some saw Trump’s rhetoric as primarily targeting China’s communist party and, by extension, mainland Chinese, Bui said.

So, he added, older Vietnamese Americans did not see Trump’s language as affecting them, even though the national rise in anti-Asian hate crimes has included Vietnamese Americans.

Local issues at play

In the months leading up to the November election a number of incidents at the state and local level didn’t bode well for Democrats with the Vietnamese community.

First Jeff LeTourneau, who was a vice chair with the Democratic Party of Orange County, got heat for sharing a Facebook post that praised Communist Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. LeTourneau stepped down. But election mailers soon went out linking Democratic Rep. Harley Rouda – then running to keep his coastal House seat – with LeTourneau’s comments, even though Rouda had immediately condemned them.

Then Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom made an unfounded comment about a nail salon sparking the COVID-19 spread in California. Ta said that caused a lot of outrage, and he believes it’s why an effort to recall Newsom is gaining support from the Vietnamese American community.

There also were reports that Rouda, who was locked in a tough battle with Republican Michelle Steel in the 48th District race, had attended “Mekong Delta” parties when he was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity at the University of Kentucky some 40 years ago. Rouda’s campaign said he didn’t recall details or controversy surrounding these parties at the time, but that he “strongly condemns” them today.

Meanwhile, Rouda’s first 2022 campaign video includes video of Steel several years ago saying: “There’s only two parties in America: Republican Party and Communist Party.”

Diep expressed frustration at political ads using “trigger words” such as Communism, which she says younger, more progressive Vietnamese have avoided because they know how traumatic such associations are for those who fled Communist Vietnam.

“Our elders use those trigger words to get people to vote with them,” Diep said. “To us, they’re almost being blinded to the issues that really truly matter to them.”

Tracy La, who heads the progressive group of young Vietnamese American activists VietRISE, said the community was flooded with Vietnamese-language mailers prior to the November election. The 25-year-old Santa Ana resident said many of the ads talked about Vietnam, China and communism.

On one hand, La said, it was a smart political strategy on the part of candidates who wanted to connect the trauma of those who fled Vietnam and score political points. But La called it “a cheap emotional trick to tap into people’s emotional trauma,” citing how her own grandfather was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

The messaging in November also showed that candidates view Vietnamese voters as a monolithic voting bloc and did not even bother to engage in a meaningful way, La said.

Today, she said Vietnamese Americans are more interested in social or structural issues that affect them: issues like housing and the lack of affordable homes or immigration and immigrant rights.

Too far

For even some longtime GOP Vietnamese, the Trump presidency pushed them over the edge.

Little Saigon developer Jao voted for Trump in 2016. Four years later, he voted for him again. This time, “reluctantly.”

“He went too far,” Jao said.

Trump, he noted, pulled out from numerous international agreements, including the Trans Pacific Partnership, meant to counteract China’s power, and the Paris Agreement to mute the effects of climate change across the world. In his quest to push an aggressive anti-illegal immigration policy, Trump also diminished legal entry into the United States such as asylum.

“He went to beat the drums for people to hear but some didn’t make sense,” Jao said. 

And while Trump’s anti-China message resonated with him, Jao said he was distressed to not see more U.S. attention to the 2016 environmental disaster brought on by the Taiwanese-owned Formosa Plastics Corp., which was accused of dumping toxic discharges from its steel plant that decimated fishing and tourism in several provinces of Vietnam.

A Republican since his arrival in Orange County, Jao said he is considering changing his registration to no party preference. He’s also considering not voting, even though he has “never missed a single election.”

Though there were no widespread irregularities in the 2020 election Jao, like many Americans who have supported Trump, nodded at the idea of anti-GOP fraud.

“I’m not sure I trust the voting system anymore,” Jao said.

Democrats ramp up outreach

With some Vietnamese Americans turned off by the current Republican party, Democrats plan to woo potential new voters. The Democratic Party of Orange County just launched a Vietnamese Outreach Committee.

“The first thing we need to do is recognize that we as Vietnamese Americans and immigrants to this country can represent and can amplify the voices of the underserved,” said Garden Grove resident Diep, who will lead the effort.

She wants the group to focus on issues, rather than rhetoric or personalities. Key issues for the community, she said, include access to affordable education and healthcare and support for small businesses.

“We realized that a lot of these issues really brought us together, they didn’t separate us,” Diep said.

Attention to what Vietnamese voters want is long overdue, according to Bui.

“Neither one party really has done a great job, since so much mobilizing work happens at the grassroots level,” Bui said.

“Both parties, at a state and national level, have taken the community for granted.”