The final map has Little Saigon in one Assembly district

Before the redistricting process even began, Tyler Diep jumped up and announced his intention to run for the Assembly. In some district. Didn’t know which one yet, but running nonetheless, Diep said then.

That turns out to be a clever call, as the final draft approved by the Citizens Redistricting Commission (interactive map here) provides for an Assembly district that’s dominated by the thicket of Viet voters known as Little Saigon.

Now of course if Diep could feel the Viet votes, so can many others. Just to name a few: Lactan Nuygen (click here), Joe Dovinh (click here), Long Pham (click here). (Pham is a current office-holder and may not risk his seat, but there’s nothing holding back the rest.) They all smell blood, and are unlikely to let Diep have a cakewalk.

The Assembly district, temporarily numbered 72, has a voter base that’s 28% Asian, 15% Latino, 1% black.

At the Congressional level, however, Diep’s boss Van Tran is not facing so good a prospect.

Three new Congressional districts share Little Saigon

Currently, Little Saigon is divided between Congressional districts 46 and 47. CD 46 has the majority share and is represented by Dana Rohrabacher; CD 47 has the smaller part and is represented by Loretta Sanchez.

The new district map puts even more of Little Saigon in the coastal district, leaving one small piece for a district that reaches into Long Beach, and a sliver in the Santa Ana/Anaheim district that’s Sanchez’s natural home.

Little Saigon today: in 2 Congressional districts

The district that runs along the coast, temporarily numbered 48, is 16% Asian, 12% Latino, and 1% black. The second district, reaching into Long Beach, is 19% Asian, 20% Latino, and 9% black. The third slice on the Eastern edge of Little Saigon is in Sanchez’s district and is 15% Asian, 42% Latino and 3% black.

Now, in places like Long Beach and Santa Ana/Anaheim, “Asian” doesn’t imply support for the right of the Republican party.

The new map also puts less of Little Saigon in Sanchez’s district than before, making the task of taking her on even more difficult.

So what it means is that if Van Tran wants to run, he will have to take on Rohrabacher – something he is not expected to do.

Not that it matters. Tran told Nguoi Viet’s Dzung Do that he ain’t planning no run for no offices.

Tan Nguyen facing reporters shortly after the scandal broke weeks before the 2006 general elections.

“Terrible day” is what former GOP Congressional candidate Tan Nguyen described to the Bolsavik his feelings on Valentine’s Day when federal judge David O. Carter sentenced him to one year in prison for lying to investigators about his role in sending a ”don’t vote” campaign letter targeting Latino voters.

Nguyen was convicted in December of lying to investigators and getting a campaign worker to take the blame for his actions in sending out a mailer targeting Latino voters trying to get them to not vote in the 2006 campaign for the congressional seat held by Rep. Loretta Sanchez.

That was a re-trial. Earlier, in August, the judge had declared a mistrial after the jury in that trial was stuck at 11-1 in favor of conviction on one count of lying to investigators and 9-3 on one count involving the campaign worker.

Nguyen told the Bolsavik today he is appealing the conviction and sentencing. But, for all practical purposes, he was hoping “only to take the felony away.” The one year sentence – he would have served it out by the time the appeal is heard anyway, Nguyen said. In federal court, a convicted defendant must serve time while pending appeal.

Citing Nguyen’s “exemplary” life before lying to investigators, the judge allowed Nguyen to report himself to prison on March 28. His lawyer Dean Steward said Nguyen is expected to spend about 10 months in a minimum-security facility in Southern California and then be moved to a halfway house.

Resigned to incarceration, Nguyen said he just wnated to “get it out of the way.”

In court, the prosecution painted Nguyen as an evil man who “threw under the bus” his campaign volunteers, whom he blamed for the letter. One of them is a close friend from college.

In attendance at the sentencing is Nhi Ho (in Vietnamese: Ho Van Xuan Nhi), a former co-chair of Van Tran’s 2004 campaign for Assembly. Ho sent out a lengthy email berating the campaign workers for testifying against Nguyen, calling them “false friends” and traitors.

Nguyen is currently involved in numerous big-ticket development projects. Asked by the Bolsavik what would happen to the projects, he said he had “good partners and they will take care of business.”

Nguyen ran in last year’s congressional race for the same seat, but lost handily in the Republican primary to Van Tran.

He had overwhelmingly won the Republican primary in 2006, getting 55.4% of the vote in a three-way race. Going into the general, Nguyen’s campaign sent out a letter that’s commonly interpreted by Democrats and Republicans alike as threatening U.S. citizens of Mexican origins that they can’t vote. The Governator Schwarzenegger (still popular back then) called it “appalling,” OC GOP leader Scott Baugh said he didn’t believe Nguyen’s denial, and all the Vietnamese candidates who only a month earlier had taken a joint “solidarity” campaign photo with him (Van Tran, Lan Quoc Nguyen, etc.) all jumped ship.

Later discussions centered on whether the word “emigrado” in the letter refers to non-citizen immigrants, or to all immigrants, totally ignoring any chilling effects the letter may have. The state knew it, though, and sent out counter-letters to all the people on the Tan Nguyen mailing list.

The State of California investigated him. However, in 2007, the new Attorney General, Democrat Jerry Brown, thought it was no-harm-no-foul and voluntarily dismissed the case.

In 2008, however, the U.S. Justice Department under Republican President George W. Bush indicted Nguyen.

The Statement of Votes is a 2630-page document from the OC Registrar of Voters, breaking down votes by precinct for every race in the November election. There are also a few important subtotals. The document is provided in PDF format, so trying to re-analyze the numbers would not be possible – unless one is willing to pay for the original spreadsheet format.

Even at the level provided by the Registrar of Voters, a few interesting details emerge.

* In the city of Westminster, in each and every precinct, and also in every subpart of the vote-by-mail ballots, Mayoral candidate Bruce Tran lost to incumbent Mayor Margie Rice by significant margins. He’d get two digits while she’d get three, for example. The closest Tran came was in Precinct 39368 (in the southwest corner of Bolsa and Ward), where both candidates get 14 votes.

* In Precinct 39274, which includes the house Andy Quach crashed into when he was driving drunk, he finished third, but ahead of both other Viet candidates. The result for that precinct is: Alin Hamade 72, Penny Loomer 57, Andy Quach 52, Tri Ta 45, Joy Neugebauer 34, Khoa Do 27, and Ginger Waugh-Borden 20.

* In the overlap of the City of Westminster and the 68th Assembly District, an area that can be considered a stronghold of Van Tran influence with Vietnamese voters, the top finisher for Westminster City Council is Tri Ta, and the second place is taken by Khoa Do. Quach comes in third. Within the confines of the data provided by the Statement of Votes, this may support a conclusion that Van Tran followers support Tri Ta, Khoa Do, and Andy Quach, in that order.

In that same Van Tran stronghold, the Vietnamese-American candidate to replace him, Phu Nguyen, scored 7551 votes to Alan Mansoor’s 7362, thus lending support to a conclusion that the majority of Van Tran’s Viet supporters vote for Phu Nguyen, just to a lesser extent.

* Another identifiable Van Tran stronghold is the overlap between his Assembly district 68 and the Congressional district he was running in, the 47. In that overlap, he bested Loretta Sanchez 12,693 to 11,012. He also finished ahead in his old city Garden Grove, finishing 12,602 to 11,612.

And of course Tran lost in places he’s expected to lose. In the city of Santa Ana, for example, he got less than half of Sanchez’s votes,  10,577 to 21,831.

He did lose in a few surprising places. In the North side, where the 47 overlaps the Assembly 72, Tran lost 6,483 to 9,105.

* Many Viet candidates got an overwhelming percentage of their votes from vote-by-mail. In the race for the Westminster City Council, for example, the ratio of vote-by-mail are, from high to low:

Khoa Do 75.7%
Tri Ta 70.9%
Andy Quach 57.0%
Ginger Waugh-Borden 53.2%
Alin Hamade 52.6%
Penny Loomer 51.7%
Joy Neugebauer 51.6%

In the 68th Assembly race, it’s:

Long Pham 79.6%
Phu Nguyen 54.8%
Alan Mansoor 53.5%

In the 47th Congressional:

Van Tran 61.5%
Loretta Sanchez 51.5%
Ceci Iglesias 46.8%

However, because Tran’s grand total is behind by 13,000+ votes, Sanchez actually got more votes by mail than him, 26,195 to 23,174.

Across the country, except for a few bright spots, most Viet candidate fall flat, losing their races, sometimes spectacularly.

Now, of course, there is such a thing as a “Vietnamese bounce” – late absentee ballots cast mostly by Vietnamese – which has caused people (including the Bolsavik here) to sometimes prematurely announce the demise of some campaigns.

But, from the way things look, even the Vietnamese bounce won’t help this time.

Starting with the highest ranking Viet elected official, U.S. Rep. Joseph Cao, he of the claim to fame as the only Republican to vote for health care reform.

Two years ago, Cao won in a year where most Republicans lost. Now that most Republicans are winning, Cao lost spectacularly, 34%-64%, and conceded early in the night.

Another Viet Congress hopeful, California Assemblyman Van Tran, ended the night trailing Rep. Loretta Sanchez 42%-51% with all precincts counted. The distance to be made up is 4,993 votes, a spread widely considered too wide for late absentees to cover.

And the man who had hoped to replace Tran in the Assembly, Democrat Phu Nguyen, fought valiantly in a district with 1/3 more Republicans than Democrats and in a Republican-leaning year. Phu Nguyen got all the way up to 44%-56%, and fell 8,000 votes short.

Two groups lost big in Little Saigon. One is an organization calling itself, well, actually, not sure what its English name is, but it held a public voting all over Little Saigon earlier this year, resulting in a committee of 7 that’s supposed to be the official representatives of the community. Its grandiose Vietnamese name translates into the Committee of Representatives of the Community.

The Vice-President of the group is Bruce Tran, owner of VHN-TV. (Click here for all entries tagged Bruce Tran.) Tran ran for mayor of Westminster, and lost big time, 19%-71%.

The spokesman of the committee that organized that public voting, Charlie Chi Manh Nguyen, ran for the Huntington Beach Union HSD, which reaches into and covers parts of Westminster. With 3 positions available, Nguyen ended in 4th place with a little over half the votes the 3rd place person got.

The other group that lost big is SBTN-TV, the media giant that had backed Hoa Van Tran for OC Supervisor. This time, SBTN stands behind the Westminster City Council race for Khoa Do, a show host who’s well thought of in the community, having volunteered for several popular community events. Despite the might of mass media thrown in, Do ended up next to last place.

It’s not as if other Viet candidates for council fared any better. Incumbent Andy “DUI” Quach burned tens of thousands on the race, and ended up 48 votes behind the other Viet incumbent, Tri Ta. It looks like there will no longer be a Viet majority on the Westminster city council, as challenger Penny Loomer – almost a winner two years ago – took the first spot, leaving Quach and Ta sort out among themselves the 48 votes plus-or-minus whatever late absentees, for the second position available.

Also running in the area is former Councilman Tony Lam, the first Vietnamese-American to win public office. Returning to politics seeking a seat on the Midway City Sanitary District, he ended dead last.

There is one local bright spot. In the city of Fountain Valley, businessman Michael Vo, owner of a traffic school, finished ahead of two incumbents to win a seat on the city council. (In this same race, another candidates reputedly also supported by SBTN ended in the single digits.) This marks the first time an OC Viet candidate wins without the votes of Westminster/Garden Grove.

And there’s an out-of-state bright spot. State Representative Hubert Vo in Texas held off a powerful challenge by his Republican opponent and is leading by around 1000 votes when the election office there went to sleep and stopped updating its web site for the night.

The supporter is Vo Long Trieu, a former Minister for Youth Affairs in the government of South Vietnam and a frequent writer of opinion pieces in Vietnamese-language papers. The accuser is one Henry Vuong, who wrote up his experience with Bruce here. The accusation is that Bruce is a nasty guy etc but the gist of the physical altercation is that Bruce dared Vuong to hit him, Vuong did, and ended up getting pummeled.

A third-party witness from a nearby business told Nguoi Viet Daily News that he watched the fight from the beginning and saw Bruce Tran lock Vuong in a chokehold and keep on punching him.

Bruce Tran’s reaction was pretty cool and calm. He told Nguoi Viet that the fight was 8 years ago, when he was young, and not like he is now. He said “men fighting each other is such a normal thing.” But if someone insists on holding it against him, then there’s nothing he can do about it, he said.

On Viet Weekly, Bruce brought out his wife to say what a great guy he is. Interestingly enough, Bruce never brought out other people mentioned in Vuong’s blog, including his former business partner.

Anyway, so Vo Long Trieu on his ad (click on pic for full ad) says he really wants to “satisfy his ethnic pride” by seeing a Vietnamese elected mayor of Westminster.

And hey so what if Bruce beat some guy. Vo Long Trieu draws the comparison with an alleged incident where Napoleon physically kicked his foreign minister in the stomach. Trieu, who loves to pepper his conversation with French words, misspelled the foreign minister’ name, Charles Talleyrand, as “Taylérand.” And he concludes, “a hot temper does not mean a lack of leadership skills.”

The Bolsavik has no idea where Trieu got his Napoleon anecdote from, but Trieu’s little story shows Trieu’s idea of an admirable “leader” is someone who reversed the course of democracy, overthrew a constitutional government, waged war wantonly, went down in disastrous defeat twice, caused untold devastation to his own country, killed off 1.4 million of his fellow countrymen (when the total population of men, women, children, elderly was just 29 million), and turned the rest into widows, orphans and invalids.

If anything, it reveals a lot about Trieu, maybe a thing or two about the ministry that Trieu used to lead and hopefully is part of the explanation for the shortness of his tenure there.

"One of the reasons is to not allow the City Council of Santa Ana be all-Mexican," says candidate Nam Pham. Click to view the whole ad.

The boast appears in a rather rambling personal statement placed in Viet Herald Daily News. (The Bolsavik bought a week’s worth and found it in the 10/13/2010 edition. Heheheh.) In it, Pham went for several paragraphs about how he had first hesitated to run because he was comparing “the ratio of Mexican-American voters with white American voters together with Asian-American voters” and had found it hard to win.

But then, a group of white voters approached him and offered to help him for many reasons. Don’t know what those “many reasons” are, but Pham did offer up “one of the reasons”: To “not allow the City Council of Santa Ana to be all-Mexican.”

So these white voters have been helping him out a lot, going so far as to, Pham says, ”print my flyers and help distribute to each home.”

Not that Pham is anti-Mexican. He does have Mexican friends, apparently.

The first name mentioned in the statement is Assemblyman Jose Solorio, former councilmember of Santa Ana, who “even though he’s Mexican-American, his wife is Chinese” – so guess that makes him ok. Pham knows Solorio is ok because Solorio named Pham to the Santa Ana Library Commission.

Pham is running for the Ward 6 seat, currently held by Sal Tinajero. In addition to his unnamed white friends, Pham is also counting on the fact that there are “two Mexican candidates who may split the Mexican vote,” Pham writes.

Starting with the Loretta Sanchez – Van Tran competition. It suddenly became the focus of all sorts of media outlets, because the possibility that Tran may actually win became more visible after Sanchez committed a big-time boo boo on air, caught by OC Weekly managing editor Gustavo Arellano and forcing the 14-year veteran Congresswoman to apologize for it. The story went national, and all of a sudden, the race catches everyone’s attention.

Tran’s campaign milked it for all they could. (Some, such as a group of local journalists interviewed on KPCC, thought Tran’s interpretation was unfair. But hey, since when is electoral politics not unfair?)

Which is funny because the Tran campaign totally missed it the first time around. Right after the Sanchez interview on Univision, the Tran campaign started complaining about … something else altogether.

Then there’s Phu Nguyen‘s campaign to fill Tran’s seat in the Assembly. A Daily Pilot story came out accusing Nguyen of not living in his Westminster home like he says. Whatever effect the story may have in other parts of the district, however, it doesn’t seem to have much traction with the Viet electorate.

Just in case, though, the Nguyen campaign accelerated the rate of mailers sent to voters. It also sent out a press release from a polling company showing he’s within the poll’s margin of error from beating Costa Mesa mayor Alan Mansoor, and that within the Vietnamese-American community, he’s way ahead 55-19%.

Best Friends Forever: From left, Janet Nguyen, OCGOP Chair Scott Baugh, Van Tran

Sanchez is bringing in the big gun, getting former President Bill Clinton to come to the district. Tran countered with an appearance by GOP head honcho Michael Steele, in a press conference that’s inexplicably squeezed into a tiny little fruit store at the Asian Garden Mall.

But then Van Tran made the party-politics score of the year: He got his nemesis OC Supervisor Janet Nguyen to officially endorse him at a press conference. This is, of course, not the first time recently that the two shared a stage. They did when Janet Nguyen inaugurated a $340,000 white elephant in the middle of Little Saigon a few weeks ago.

Janet, who once was viciously accused of being a commie by Tran’s acolytes, did not hide the reason why she’s doing it. She said it’s so as not to “disappoint … our party.”

Whatever. An endorsement is an endorsement and Tran will take it.

Someone then asked if this means all of his guys will work with Janet from now on. And Tran said, each elected official is independent and it’s up to the elected official.

Tan Nguyen reading a statement to the press in 2006, when he was investigated by the state Department of Justice.

The jury deadlocked in the trial of former Congressional candidate Tan Nguyen, and the judge declared a mistrial, reports the OC Register’s Martin Wisckol here.

Nguyen is accused of lying to investigators and getting a campaign worker to take the blame for his actions in sending out a mailer targeting Latino voters trying to get them to not vote. The federal judge in the trial of the polled the jury late Friday. They were stuck at 11-1 in favor of conviction on one count of lying to investigators and 9-3 on one count involving the campaign worker.

“We’re disappointed that we didn’t get an acquittal, but we’ll live to fight another day,” said Dean Steward, Nguyen’s attorney.

The prosecution has not decided whether it will retry the case. It must decide by the Sept. 13 status hearing.

The case arose out of the 2006 elections. Earlier this year, Nguyen ran again in the Republican primary, but lost to the party establishment’s favorite, Van Tran. Tran, for his part, went to a Tea Party and joyfully posed for pictures with a bumper sticker that says “Jail Tan Nguyen.”

Apparently, he thought better of it, and his afterthoughts were strong enough for him to claim in writing that the bumper sticker was “thrust on me.” A Vietnamese-language paper took the story and picture off its web site.

Tan Nguyen overwhelmingly won the Republican primary in 2006, getting 55.4% of the vote in a three-way race. Going into the general, Nguyen’s campaign sent out a letter that’s commonly interpreted by Democrats and Republicans alike as threatening U.S. citizens of Mexican origins that they can’t vote. The Governator Schwarzenegger (still popular back then) called it “appalling,” OC GOP leader Scott Baugh said he didn’t believe Nguyen’s denial, and all the Vietnamese candidates who only a month earlier had taken a joint “solidarity” campaign photo with him (Van Tran, Lan Quoc Nguyen, etc.) all jumped ship.

Later discussions centered on whether the word “emigrado” in the letter refers to non-citizen immigrants, or to all immigrants, totally ignoring any chilling effects the letter may have. The state knew it, though, and sent out counter-letters to all the people on the Tan Nguyen mailing list.

The State of California investigated him. However, in 2007, the new Attorney General, Democrat Jerry Brown, thought it was no-harm-no-foul and voluntarily dismissed the case.

In 2008, however, the U.S. Justice Department under Republican President George W. Bush indicted Nguyen.