Kamala's Orange County ripple

Aug

2024

POLITICO Article

Kamala's Orange County ripple

By Ally Mutnick, Dustin Gardiner, and Lara Korte

THE BUZZ: DOWN-TICKET BOOST — How is Kamala Harris’ rise affecting the Democrats running for Congress in her home state of California? Look no further than Derek Tran in Orange County.

Tran’s effort to unseat GOP Rep. Michelle Steel was considered by Democrats to be competitive but a bit of a reach — Steel had herself ousted a Democratic incumbent in 2020 and batted away a challenger in 2022.

Then Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

Voters, especially those under the age of 30, were flooding the office phone lines, asking to volunteer and how to get yard signs. Donors he had never spoken to before were suddenly calling Tran back, eager to give.

“We saw a big bump in fundraising,” Tran said in an interview with POLITICO. “It was just like this amazing momentum and energy, and just the way people were talking about this race again — it was like 2008.”

And now new data — one of the first publicly released House polls since Harris took over the top of the ticket — shows he’s neck-and-neck with the incumbent. Tran and Steel are tied at 47 percent each, according to a poll from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee shared exclusively with POLITICO.

Tran, an attorney and Army veteran, had already outraised the incumbent last quarter with an impressive $1.3 million haul. As the son of Vietnamese refugees, he’s received something close to celebrity status in a district that has the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam itself.

Democrats are suddenly feeling a lot more optimistic about their chances of flipping the seat.

Steel is one of 16 GOP members in districts that Biden carried in 2020. That would normally put her at the top of the list of vulnerable incumbents. But Biden was so unpopular that even Tran’s own polling from late May showed the president losing by 6 points a district he won by 6 points in 2020.

But that survey also showed Tran trailing Steel by just 1 point. Another Democratic poll from mid-July, before Biden dropped out, showed Tran leading Steel 43 to 42 percent, according to a person familiar with the poll. It was commissioned by the House Majority PAC, a group with close ties to House Democratic leadership. That means Tran, like other down-ballot Democrats, was continuing to outrun Biden — the question was whether Biden’s numbers would drop far enough that it dragged them down, too.

Steel campaign spokesperson Lance Trover disputed that Tran was in the lead, saying internal GOP polling showed Steel ahead in the race. “Derek Tran and the DCCC lied about his last poll and they’re lying again,” he said.

Now, as Harris takes the lead in polling across the country, Democratic congressional candidates say they’re seeing their races take on new life. And Tran’s race is moving up the list of priorities: As Harris erases Donald Trump’s lead over Biden, the battleground map is shifting with it.

One clear sign Democrats are serious about the race: House Majority Forward, a nonprofit group aligned with House Majority PAC, is spending $1 million on ads hitting Steel this month in the Los Angeles media market.

“This is a Biden +6 district,” Tran said. “And if the energy remains the way it is now in the last few weeks, I think she’s going to carry the district with the same numbers, if not better than President Biden.”

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