Maturing Little Saigon gives candidates a closer look

Bob Dornan had it made, and he knew it. The firebrand conservative congressman could count on his Little Saigon constituency in Orange County to deliver the goods because he was known as a steadfast anticommunist. And to a community filled with Vietnamese who had fled the Communist regime in the 1970s, Dornan was a bulwark in their new country.

Man, how the decades fly by.

Little Saigon is 30 years old and, like a lot of 30-year-olds, has broadened its interests. It’s paying more and more attention to local politics.

Which means that politicians have to pay attention to it.

Anticommunism is still way, way up there on the agenda, but you don’t have to be a longtime anticommunist to get votes in Little Saigon. Nor do you have to have a Vietnamese surname or, for that matter, understand a word of Vietnamese.

Just ask Lynn Daucher, the former Brea-Olinda school board member and assemblywoman who, according to her campaign manager for the still-undecided 34th state Senate seat, had a big fat zero when it came to name recognition in Little Saigon when she started out.

As of late Monday, it may be the Vietnamese American vote that secures Daucher’s victory. With 50,433 votes, she was leading Orange County Supervisor Lou Correa by 361 votes.

Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley said late Monday afternoon he hoped to have the official tally by next week but couldn’t guarantee it.

Daucher’s campaign manager, Bryan Lanza, says the candidate went door to door in 86 of the district’s 377 precincts. She didn’t eschew Vietnamese American neighborhoods, he says. Early on, she needed an interpreter, but eventually voters at least knew who she was, he says.

It’s hard to imagine a candidate like Daucher pounding the Little Saigon pavement a generation ago in search of voters. She might have considered it futile, given her anonymity among them. She probably would have figured she just wouldn’t matter to them.

But this year, Lanza says, even without precise vote totals available to him, it’s obvious the Vietnamese vote has been crucial to a victory that is within Daucher’s reach.

“There weren’t enough other votes, because of who the opponent was, to get votes anywhere else,” he says. What he means is that Correa is a Democrat in a state Senate district where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans, 116,200 to 108,800.

“They knew Lou, and they didn’t know Lynn,” he says.

But in that mix, according to Daucher campaign consultant Chad Morgan, were 44,300 registered voters of Vietnamese descent. And according to Morgan, 50% of them are registered Republicans, with the rest evenly divided between Democrats and other affiliations.

My colleague Mai Tran reported Sunday the ways in which Daucher penetrated the Vietnamese community. I won’t repeat them today, but they involved a multifaceted approach that used Vietnamese-language ads, a key endorsement from Assemblyman Van Tran and some strategic political positions.

But this election is not just about Daucher vs. Correa.

It’s about Little Saigon, and the evolution of yet another immigrant group in America.

I’ve got a feeling Correa was blindsided by what happened to him in Little Saigon. He had shown up there at various times over the years and had the name recognition of being a county supervisor.

But instead of merely voting for the American name they knew, voters apparently gave the previously unknown Daucher a chance. No doubt, it didn’t hurt that she was linked with the successful effort to recognize the former South Vietnamese flag as the symbol of the Vietnamese American community in California.

Morgan, the consultant, thinks Little Saigon officially came of age earlier this year, when in another state Senate race, the losing candidate in a special election carried every other significant voter group except Vietnamese Americans. The candidate lost a close race.

The Daucher-Correa race is but another example, Morgan says. “Every year in the past, candidates have come in and given lip service,” he says. That will no longer work, he says.

I wanted to ask Correa on Monday about his fortunes in Little Saigon, but hadn’t heard from him by the time I finished up. I asked Morgan to speculate as to whether Correa would be surprised if, in fact, he lost the Vietnamese vote. He presumed he would.

“Lynn had never campaigned there before,” Morgan says, “and he’d been coming there for so long ... by default it would have to go to him.”

The flag issue was significant, Morgan says, but insists it hasn’t rendered Little Saigon a one-issue community. That isn’t to say that opposing flying the South Vietnam flag might not cripple a candidate’s chances, but taxes, seniors’ issues and “family values” also resonate with voters, he says.

Political evolution takes time. Someday, perhaps, the Vietnamese flag issue won’t be a deal-breaker for a candidate.

But for now, at least, Lou Correa is sitting somewhere licking his wounds and wondering how a total stranger apparently won over so many of his old friends.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.