This Winning California Democrat Saw Kamala Harris As A Benefit, Not A Burden

Across the country, vulnerable House Democrats ― and Democrats hoping to take over Republican House seats ― did their best to create distance with Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election.

Reps. Jared Golden (Maine) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), who were seeking reelection in seats Donald Trump carried in 2020, would not say for whom they planned to vote. Other Democrats in tough seats joined Republicans in criticizing Harris’s record on border security.

But for Rep. Derek Tran, an Army veteran and attorney who flipped California’s 45th Congressional District, Harris was an asset, rather than a liability.

“What I would like to point out is that she did better than President [Joe] Biden did in this district, so her message on the economy did resonate in my community,” Tran told HuffPost in a December interview. “That is true, and that is something that I made sure that I focused on.”

Harris campaigned on building an opportunity economy that would incentivize construction of millions of private homes, and provide new tax credits for parents of newborns, small businesses and first-time home buyers.

The biggest way in which Harris helped Tran was, naturally, in replacing Biden, whose steep drop in the polls following his debate performance threatened candidates down ballot.

“The toughest part for me was trying to campaign for myself and the Biden administration and their accomplishments, before Harris got into the race,” he said.

After Harris secured the nomination, the energy in his suburban, Orange County-centered seat changed, both within the Democratic base and among the broader electorate.

“People were literally just volunteering, coming out, asking what they could do to help, because they wanted to elect her,” Tran said. “The energy was palpable.”

“Her energy, her commitment to happiness and just wanting to do good for this country, while focusing on policy, was a huge benefit here,” he added. “She campaigned off of the economy and building X amount of homes ― the same type of talking points that I was able to use when I was in the community. Hence her success and my success in winning this district.”

Of course, Tran was not exactly running in deep red terrain. Biden had carried the seat by six percentage points in 2020.

And Tran had plenty of other advantages. A son of Vietnamese refugees, he is the first Vietnamese American to represent the seat with the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam.

Republican Michelle Steel, whom he unseated, is Korean American and thus did not have the same cultural resonance in the communities in the Vietnamese-American hub known as Little Saigon.

“My parents came here because they lost the country to communism, and they had to flee a country. She came over here for economic gain ― very different,” Tran said. “So there is no country she lost. She can go back to South Korea, or her family can at any time. You go back to Vietnam, you’ll be prosecuted.”

Steel was nonetheless a formidable opponent, having unseated one-term Democrat Harley Rouda in 2020, when the seat was more Republican-leaning, and then holding onto it in 2022 when redistricting had made it more Democratic.

To address voters’ biggest concerns, Tran, who practiced personal injury and consumer rights law, spoke often about the need to tamp down on the corporate price gouging ― or “greedflation” ― that he and other Democrats believe is driving up the cost of living. It’s a message that Harris herself pushed intermittently during her brief presidential campaign.

And on the airwaves, he slammed Steel for twice co-sponsoring the Life at Conception Act, which would categorize fertilized embryos and fetuses as deserving the same protections as humans after birth.

The law aims to lay the groundwork for a federal abortion ban and does not include a carveout for in-vitro fertilization treatments. Citing her support for IVF, Steel withdrew her name from the bill in March ― a move that Tran said was at once inadequate and telling.

“It showed her for who she really was, which is a flip flopper who would say anything and do anything to get votes,” he said.