Steel and Tran locked in tight race for California’s 45th Congressional District

The competitive race between Republican Rep. Michelle Steel and Democratic challenger Derek Tran for an Orange County swing district was too close to call Tuesday night, as votes continue to be counted.

Steel, 69, and Tran, 44, went head-to-head in one of the nation’s tightest contests for the U.S. House of Representatives. It was one of several House races in California with the potential to shape which party will control Congress next year.

Steel was first elected to Congress in 2020. Two years later, she defeated Democrat Jay Chen in another hotly contested race.

The 2024 race against Tran proved to be a costly and acrimonious campaign as the Democratic Party pushed to capture the seat centered in Orange County’s Little Saigon community. The district includes Westminster, Garden Grove and Buena Park, among other cities.

Tran aimed to resonate with Vietnamese American voters, an important voting bloc in the district, by sharing his story as the son of Vietnamese refugees. Steel also tried to strengthen her support among Vietnamese Americans, many of whom have been loyal members of the Republican Party for decades.

The tension came to a boiling point in recent weeks when Steel’s campaign sent mailers depicting Tran as a communist sympathizer. Tran criticized the mailers as “dirty tricks,” while Steel’s campaign said it was a response to attack ads from Tran that accused her husband, Shawn Steel — former chairman of the California Republican Party — of “selling access” to the Chinese Communist Party.

In a sign of how important the race was in the fight for control of Congress, former President Clinton appeared in Orange County and urged Tran’s supporters to elect the Army veteran, noting that his win could help Democrats provide “the last guardrail against a more tyrannical government or the beginning of a new majority.”

Steel benefited from huge spending by the cryptocurrency industry, which poured $2.8 million into efforts to support her reelection. That was the largest sum the industry’s Fairshake PAC spent on any House race in the nation.