Perhaps nowhere else in Orange County has voter behavior fluctuated so strongly in the past eight years than in Little Saigon.
Many Little Saigon neighborhoods — mainly in Garden Grove and Westminster — chose a Democrat in the 2016 presidential primary (and ultimately chose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the general election). But many later reversed course and backed Trump in 2020, in the primary and general elections.
The Clinton name drove many Vietnamese voters to go blue in 2016, said Long Bui, an international studies professor at UC Irvine. The name evoked voters’ memory of the economy in the 1990s, marked by low inflation, job creation and wage growth, when the former secretary of state’s husband was president.
However, the desire of Vietnamese Americans — who have memories of living under a communist regime and harbor strong anti-communist sentiment — for the U.S. to have a tougher approach to communist governments in China and Vietnam might have driven a red tide in the more recent elections, Bui said.
Trump, in his first term, launched a trade war against China by imposing tariffs on at least $50 billion of Chinese imports.
“This switch demonstrates how complex and multi-directional this voting bloc can be,” said Bui, who has written about Vietnamese American anticommunist work and intergenerational differences in relation to homeland politics.
Primary voters in the Vietnamese community in 2024, when put on a map, continue to lean red. But that doesn’t mean the electorate will reliably vote Republican, Bui said.
“Vietnamese voters might continue supporting a Republican at the top of the ticket, as they did in the past, if a candidate appeals to their concerns with China, inflation, housing prices, etc.,” he said. “Vietnamese American voting patterns are hard to pin down because the community is diverse and heterogeneous. Like the rest of this purple county, it straddles the conservative-liberal divide.”
Elsewhere, the results of the past two presidential primary elections in Orange County indicate a purple county where Democrats are making bigger inroads, and that observation still seems to hold according to the 2024 presidential primary results.
Orange County voters overwhelmingly threw their support behind Biden and Trump in the Democratic and Republican primaries. According to raw counts of all presidential votes across the board, Trump received the most votes, 236,456, of the nearly 40 people on the presidential primary ballot, ahead of Biden only by about 18,500 votes.
This year, Biden received the most votes in many neighborhoods in the county’s three most populous cities: Anaheim, Santa Ana and Irvine. In the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries, those three cities were reliably blue, while wealthy coastal areas around Huntington Beach and Newport Beach have largely stayed red.
To the north, nearly every neighborhood in Yorba Linda and Villa Park has gone for a Republican candidate since 2016, similar to a majority of neighborhoods in South Orange County.
Using the maps: Tap or hover over a precinct to see how people there voted. Click or tap a candidate’s name to see where they received the most votes. You can also zoom into a specific region on the map using the feature on the bottom right.
The grayed-out areas represent precincts where fewer than 10 ballots were cast.
• 37.7% overall voter turnout
• 1,819,334 registered voters
• 685,038 primary ballots counted
• 50.1% overall voter turnout
• 1,633,966 registered voters
• 818,021 primary ballots counted
• 49.6% overall voter turnout
• 1,395,380 registered voters
• 691,802 primary ballots counted
