A neophyte Vietnamese American city councilwoman took a slim lead Tuesday in the race for the Orange County Board of Supervisors with as many as 3,400 ballots remaining to be counted.
Janet Nguyen, a 30-year-old serving her first term on the Garden Grove City Council, led Garden Grove school board member Trung Nguyen by 52 votes with all precincts reporting in the winner-take-all special election to fill a vacant seat on the board.
Still to be counted were provisional and late absentee ballots, according to the county registrar of voters office.
The two Vietnamese American candidates garnered nearly as many votes as the six other candidates in the race combined, in part by focusing their turnout efforts on voters in Garden Grove and Westminster.
They also ran aggressive absentee ballot drives that gave them an advantage over candidates who depended on election day turnout at the polls that was expected -- accurately, as it turned out -- to be tepid.
Told of the results at an election night party at the Azteca Restaurant, Nguyen hugged her political mentor, former Orange County board chairman William Steiner, and her husband, and professed herself "overwhelmed" by the results.
She declined to declare outright victory.
Should the results hold, Nguyen will join a small but growing cadre of Vietnamese American elected officials.
They include Van Tran, the California state Assemblyman who, with a Texas state legislator, are the highest-ranking elected Vietnamese Americans in the nation.
"It's been a growing trend," said Fred Smoller, a political science professor at Chapman University in Orange.
"The history lesson here is that whether it's the Irish or other groups, ethnic solidarity is a very important source of power in American politics. [Voters] voted for candidates they identified with rather than political parties."
The race kicked off when Supervisor Lou Correa was elected to the state Senate in November. The district, the most densely populated in the county, covers Santa Ana, Westminster, Garden Grove and unincorporated territory.
Although the race is officially nonpartisan, the county Democratic and Republican parties threw considerable support behind two major candidates in the race, Tom Umberg on the Democratic side and Carlos Bustamante on the Republican.
The Democratic Party endorsed Umberg, although the GOP remained officially neutral.
