Four Democrats are trying to flip California’s 45th congressional district and unseat Rep. Michelle Steel, a Republican from Seal Beach who is serving her second term in Congress.
Steel is being challenged by policy advocate Cheyenne Hunt, Garden Grove City Councilmember Kim Nguyen-Penaloza, affordable housing attorney Aditya Pai and attorney Derek Tran.
Steel’s seat is deemed “lean Republican” by the Cook Political Report, which analyzes elections, although registered Democrats in the district outnumber registered Republicans. According to state data, Democrats account for 37.9% of all the registered voters in the district, which covers portions of Los Angeles and Orange counties, while 32.4% are Republicans and 24% are no party preference voters.
CA-45 is one of 31 House seats held by Republicans that the national Democratic Party’s campaign arm sees as a “key to winning a Democratic House majority.” The majority-Asian district is home to Orange County’s Little Saigon, the largest Vietnamese enclave outside of Vietnam, and they are expected to play an outsize role in determining who represents them in the House.
Steel, who in 2020 became one of the first Korean American women elected to Congress, previously served on the Board of Equalization and the Orange County Board of Supervisors. In Congress, she’s been an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party, introducing legislation that aims to increase oversight of foreign investments in higher education and another that restricts the use of a Chinese logistics platform by the U.S. military.
“Our greatest national security threat, the Chinese Communist Party, is watching how we handle the war in Ukraine and gauging our level of…
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