Democrats Hope Asian-American Influx Will Help Turn Orange County Blue

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Chinese and Korean immigrants, and Asian-Americans from other states, have made Irvine nearly half Asian. This has not gone unnoticed by the Irvine Company, the developer that did not so much develop as invent this master-planned city of spotless parks, top schools and cul-de-sacs out of a former sheep ranch in the 1960s, when Orange County was agricultural (think lima beans and orange groves), conservative (think Richard Nixon and the John Birch Society) and white (very, very white).

Known for its devotion to tasteful Mediterranean-ish homes and strip malls that bear approximately the same architectural relationship to Tuscany as the Las Vegas Venetian does to Venice, the company has cultivated a few new trademarks in recent years. Developments advertise second kitchens designed to seal off the aroma of Asian cooking. In-law suites cater to the Asian custom of multigenerational living. Asians smile out of ersatz family photos in the model homes. And Asian immigrant couples have been buying homes up — often for millions, often in cash.

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Orange County is now one-fifth Asian and more than one-third Latino, with a Little Saigon in Garden Grove and Westminster; a Koreatown in nearby Buena Park that is beginning to rival Los Angeles’s; and a thriving Latino community centered in Santa Ana. Forty-five percent of the county’s households speak a language other than English.

In the 45th Congressional District, whose biggest city is Irvine, three of the four Democratic candidates were born to immigrants, including one of the front-runners, Dave Min, a Korean-American law professor at the University of California, Irvine. Whichever Democrat does best in the June 5 primary will challenge Representative Mimi Walters, the Republican incumbent, in a district that has never elected anyone but Republicans — an area once famous for nurturing the political careers of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

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But when half the residents of this city of a quarter-million are Asian, it is not clear whether demographics will be destiny for the Democrats, or just, well, a faux-Mediterranean cul-de-sac.

Turnout is one reason. Asian-Americans tend not to vote in high numbers, put off by language barriers, lack of outreach from either party and a historical absence of political engagement.

Though they have gravitated toward the left ever since the 1990s, they are fractured. According to a national survey of Asian-Americans conducted after the 2016 election, Indian- and Korean-Americans tack progressive, Chinese- and Vietnamese-Americans more conservative. While Asians registered as Republicans in Orange County outnumber Asian Democrats, more than one-third of Asian voters identify as independents.

Those splits reflect the diversity of an Asian population that is one-third Vietnamese, one-sixth Korean and one-sixth Chinese, with smaller shares of Filipinos, Indians and Japanese. Those who live in Irvine are often highly educated and affluent, especially the businesspeople from mainland China and Korea who often buy up new subdivisions. But there remain pockets of poverty among the county’s Vietnamese, Cambodians and Pacific Islanders.

And though they tend to hold liberal views on issues like gun control, climate change and public spending, the political causes that some Asian-Americans have rallied around in recent years have veered conservative. Organizing on the social media platform WeChat, Chinese immigrants mobilized in 2014 to kill legislation that would have resurrected affirmative action at California universities.

Even so, many Asians oppose the Trump administration’s makeover of the immigration system, and their votes evince a broader discomfort with the president. Orange County Asians re-elected their Republican congressional representatives, yet tilted toward Mrs. Clinton in 2016.

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What could cut through the political crosscurrents this year is a simple maxim: Asians vote for Asians.

The few Asian politicians in Orange County have tended to be Republicans, not least because the party has been the only game in town. A front-runner to replace Ed Royce, a retiring Republican congressman who represents heavily Hispanic and Asian parts of northern Orange County, is a Korean-born Republican former state legislator named Young Kim.

But younger Asian-Americans, especially those born in the United States, have tended to swerve left of their elders. They include Mr. Min, a former adviser to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York who calls himself a housing finance wonk. Depending on how several other races turn out, he could become the only Korean-American in Congress, a prospect that finds its way into his pitch when Asian voters are around.

Running in Irvine, where Asians, whites and Persians alike buy million-dollar homes in large part to put their children in ultracompetitive public schools, Mr. Min has reasons both for doubt and for hope. “I joke that it’s the one district in the country where being an Asian-American law professor is an advantage,” he said.

Resistance City, this is not. Lawn signs advertising open houses tend to far outnumber those endorsing politicians. And then there is the question of Asian voters, who, beyond inconsistent turnout, are not numerous enough on their own to pick winners.

Still, Asians are the fastest-growing immigrant group in the country; in 2015, researchers at the University of California, Davis, projected that the number of eligible Asian-American voters in California would rise 37 percent by 2040.

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Mr. Min speaks only minimal Korean, making it difficult for him to tap into the community on his own. So his parents, who arrived in the United States as graduate students in 1972, have campaigned for him at Korean churches and restaurants, and Mr. Kang has prodded local Korean-language media to cover him more.

On a recent evening in Turtle Rock, a neighborhood near U.C. Irvine, virtually every white voter whose door Mr. Min knocked on was familiar with his campaign, including an ex-Republican who pledged his vote.

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Some of the Asian voters on his list proved harder to engage.

A woman named Celeste grimaced when Mr. Min told her that Ms. Walters, the Republican incumbent, was “100 percent with Trump.”

“This feels like an attack on the values that brought my parents to this country and that I grew up with,” Mr. Min added.

{snip} Nowhere is Orange County’s accelerating diversity more obvious than in its schools and shopping centers, where, in the absence of downtowns, community life unfolds.

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Local headlines this year have been a reminder that the county is still conservative turf mottled with liberal patches, not the other way around. A dozen Republican-dominated cities recently passed resolutions opposing the state’s new so-called sanctuary state law, which extends more protections to unauthorized immigrants.

Most of them were predominantly white communities.

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“It’s hard to get Asian-Americans to run,” said Cyril Yu, a deputy district attorney who lost his race for the Irvine school board in 2012. “But I think you’re going to get people who are excited, nonetheless, because an Asian-American’s on the ballot.”