GOP Courted Little Saigon

If Lynn Daucher clings to her narrow lead and wins back a state Senate seat for the Republican Party, the Orange County woman may owe it to a group of Vietnamese American leaders and consultants.

The group, known in inner circles as “Team Tran” because of its association with Assemblyman Van Tran, wrote letters to voters and engaged in a furious campaign on Vietnamese radio and television stations on Daucher’s behalf.

The belief was that Daucher, who speaks no Vietnamese and had not previously been closely associated with that community, could win the contest if she locked up the Vietnamese vote. The 34th state Senate District includes part of Little Saigon, the largest Vietnamese American community in the nation.

One of the keys, consultants said, was to persuade Daucher to let them compose campaign pieces in Vietnamese, as opposed to the campaign literature poorly translated from English on which they believed Daucher’s opponent would rely.

A close contest from the start -- and one of the most expensive Senate races in the state -- Daucher was leading Lou Correa, a former assemblyman and now a county supervisor, by 764 votes late Saturday. The Orange County registrar’s office still had about 80,921 absentee, provisional and paper ballots countywide to count. It was unknown how many of those involved the 34th District race.

The district, which has 284,212 registered voters and covers Stanton and parts of Anaheim, Buena Park, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Westminster, has been a Democratic beachhead in Republican-dominated Orange County since the election of Joe Dunn in 1998. Dunn could not run again because of term limits.

Tran, a Republican assemblyman who also represents central Orange County, said he wanted to work with Daucher to regain the seat.

“We just wanted to prove the point that we can take this seat back,” Tran said.

Team Tran is a small political cabal made up of longtime activists in the ethnic community, including Garden Grove school board members Lan Quoc Nguyen and Trung Nguyen and businessman Cuong Manh Bui, who has connections to Vietnamese media outlets.

They worked with the husband-and-wife consultant team of Chad Morgan and Daisy Tong, longtime friends of Tran’s, who officiated at their wedding.

“We had a team with a lot of different people with expertise in reaching voters,” Daucher said. “It played a substantial role” in the election.

Four months ago, Daucher -- a Brea assemblywoman whose expertise is in education -- did not know much about Vietnamese issues.

And to many Vietnamese Americans she was an unknown, unlike her rival, whose name was better recognized due to his support for Vietnamese American causes.

But members of Team Tran concluded that while Correa was engaged in popular community causes -- such as sitting in on hunger strikes and displaying the flag of South Vietnam at public events -- he was still vulnerable.

“We wanted someone who can do substantive work,” Lan Nguyen said. “We were hoping to introduce [Lynn] to the community. Our plan was to get the Vietnamese votes for her.”

The team sent out campaign mailers written in a formal, educated Vietnamese voice instead of the choppy style of hasty translations from English.

They urged Daucher to attend community events and push for pet issues, like getting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign an order recognizing the South Vietnamese flag instead of the communist one.

They drafted letters to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Daucher’s name calling for pressure on Vietnam to guarantee religious freedom and improve human rights in exchange for membership in the World Trade Organization.

And they paired the candidate up with Tran, the state’s highest-ranking Vietnamese American public official, in photos, mailers, radio ads and television spots. The team also operated phone banks urging people to vote.

Though Daucher’s supporters believe these tactics paid dividends, they are awaiting the final numbers to be sure.

“All these efforts really show that she cares about the Vietnamese community,” said Team Tran’s Daisy Tong, who runs the Saigon West public relations firm. “Before we got involved, I don’t think she knew a lot about the Vietnamese community. In a short time, we were able to deliver the message to voters.”

Bryan Lanza, Daucher’s campaign manager, agreed.

“They maximized Lynn’s exposure in a positive light,” he said. “They’re instrumental in our success.”