Challenger and Vietnamese American Derek Tran has overtaken incumbent and Korean American Michelle Steel in California’s District 45 race in Garden Grove.
Tran has come back from more than four percentage points behind. He’s consistently been narrowing the gap over the last week in the extremely close race.
This is the first time he has actually led in the race.
Nearly two full weeks after the polls closed, Tran now leads Steel by a mere 36 votes, 152, 981 – 152,945.
Several thousand votes still need to be counted and the vote is being monitored by a bi-partisan delegation.
“California’s elections are a testament to the strength of our democracy. Every legally cast ballot must be counted, and our campaign is encouraged by the results we’ve seen so far,” said Tran’s campaign manager Gowri Buddiga. “Voters in Orange and Los Angeles County deserve to have their voices heard, and we are confident that as the remaining vote-by-mail, provisional, and conditional ballots are tallied, Derek Tran will emerge victorious.”
Tran could potentially be the second new Asian American voting member of Congress and the third to be elected to a new office.
The others would be Suhas Subramanyam, the Democrat who won the District 10 House race in Virginia and Rep Andy Kim (D-Burlington County), the representative from New Jersey who won the U.S. Senate race over Curtis Bashaw by 366,000 votes.
“I had somebody tell me I’m the wrong kind of minority to win statewide,” said Kim to CBS New York. “That there’s no way that a person who looks like me can win a congressional district that Trump won. I don’t want other people to define what I am or am not capable of accomplishing…my story is not just a Korean American story. Fundamentally it’s an American story.”
Subramanyam, an Indian American, was endorsed by two former predecessors- Rep. Jennifer Wexton who decided to retire after being diagnosed with Progressive Supra-nuclear Palsy and Republican former Rep. Barbara Comstock.
“They both endorsed me because they know I’ll bridge partisan divides, that I’ll put country over party,” Subramanyam told WUSA9. “I’m putting the people and their voices first.”
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