‘This is a district that’s been carved out for Vietnamese Americans, and the people know that,’ California’s Derek Tran told Lovett, video shows
Democratic congressional candidate Derek Tran told “Obama bro” podcaster Jon Lovett that his Korean-American opponent, Rep. Michelle Steel (R., Calif.), is “not the right fit” for the district because of her race. Lovett edited the remark out of the published podcast and transcript.
“But you know, we’ve always knew [sic] that Steel is not the right fit for the district. You know, she’s Korean-American,” Tran told Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama and host of the political podcast Lovett or Leave It. “This is a district that has been carved out for Vietnamese American, and the people know that.”
The mid-October remark, which an audience member captured on video obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, was a response to Lovett asking Tran why his Southern California congressional race had recently shifted from favoring Steel, who was elected in 2022, to being a toss-up.
The podcast and transcript were released Oct. 19, and the official video was posted to YouTube two days later. But Tran’s racial commentary was cut from each public version.
“But we’ve always knew that Steel is not the right fit for the district. And the people know that,” Tran said in the publicly available recording. Between the sentences, the camera jumped to a close-up, which would allow for a portion to be cut seamlessly.
Tran’s dismissal of Steel based on her ethnicity follows months of criticism over how he and his supporters have discussed her race and heritage and comes as their competition for a heavily Asian district has reached a dead heat. The Cook Political Report last month declared the contest a toss-up.
In May, Tran, who is Vietnamese, told Punchbowl News that Steel’s background wouldn’t resonate with the district’s Vietnamese community. Steel’s parents fled North Korea for South Korea, where the Republican was born, though she was raised in Japan and eventually immigrated to the United States.
“Michelle still tries to run on that she’s a refugee, or she tried to flee communism. No, that’s not true at all,” Tran said. “She came to this country for economic gain. That’s not the same as losing one’s country after the fall of Saigon in ‘75 and having no home.”
Dozens of state and local officials, along with four Korean-American groups, responded to the comment with a sharp rebuke in a letter released by the Steel campaign, writing that Tran must “run a better campaign or get out of the race.”
Regardless, Tran echoed that same rhetoric Thursday.
“She comes into our community, and she tells us, ‘I know what it’s like to be an immigrant like you all,’” Tran told the New York Times. “No, you do not. You did not lose your country.”
In February, a local Democratic leader published an interview with Tran and noted that the challenger’s English was “perfect.” He urged readers to compare it to Steel’s, calling her Korean accent “unintelligible after 50 years in America, an intelligence thing, I guess.”
Representatives for Tran and Crooked Media, which produces Lovett’s podcast, did not respond to requests for comment.
More than one-third of the residents of Steel’s district were born outside the United States, and Asians represent the largest ethnic bloc, according to 2022 Census data. While Spanish is the most common primary language, nearly 105,000 households speak Vietnamese at home, and some 42,000 speak Korean.
