Thursday, July 16, 2009

The Challeng of Pham X Quang


With the decision to enter the race for CD 47 as a Republican a month ago, Quang X Pham is now facing the first test – Can he raise enough money to make his campaign credible?

For the Republican primary race in June against current State Assemblyman Van Tran, he will need to raise about $500,000 to be competitive. With Tran raised about $175,000 so far for the primary, Pham is a pragmatist and he will no doubt either meet the challenge or drop out.

Tran raised $250,000 but about $75,000 is for the general election against Sanchez. A lot of his long time supporters and family members (Tran’s siblings who are in the medical fields) gave $4,800 per person with half to the primary, the other half to the general election.

Quang X Pham has the credibility as an ex-Marine pilot, an author, a successful businessman and has a natural Vietnamese-American base from the many Vietnamese-American veterans (his dad was a pilot) and the Vietnamese-American voting base of County Supervisor Janet Nguyen. Even though he had often expressed of his desire to run for congress, some congressional Republican leaders would prefer that he declared his intention to them as early as April - May when Tran was heavily recruited by them.

The Vietnamese-American voters will no doubt play a role in the upcoming primary. Even though they are about 8% to 10% of the total voters in the CD 47, they represent about 20% of the Republican voters in CD 47.

Janet Nguyen has been silent about the race. Her district is 40% overlap with CD 47 and her Vietnamese American constituent is considerable. On the other Tran’s assembly district is 20% overlap with CD 47. However, Nguyen has no desire to run for congress at this point in her career. Just from the name recognition along, she would be a better bet in the CD 47 race than Tran against Sanchez. Only one out of the 5 major PACs in OC so far has committed to Tran (The Family Action PAC).

While most of the mainstream voters don’t really care at this early in the primary race, a number of observations are worthwhile sharing as LSI met up with the local Vietnamese-American news media last week.

- Both Pham and Tran have the name recognition in the community.

- The major sentiment of the community is neutral at the moment but with curiosity for Pham.
- Tran is a polarizing figure in the community with his many bitter fights against Janet Nguyen in the last 3 years.

- Janet Nguyen’s name keep popping up on whether she would run for something in 2010. There have been rumor of her possibly running against Lou Correa.

FREE ENERGY SAVING LIGHT BULBS.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 13, 2009

CONTACTS: Fiona Chan, PG&E, External Communications (415) 973-7835
Lingxia Meng/Gwendolyn Mitchell, County of Santa Clara,
Office of Public Affairs (408) 299-5130


This Saturday July 18, from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM

PG&E and Santa Clara County will distribute free energy saving fluorescent bulbs at the following two locations

Ocean Supermarket, 2 S. Park Victoria Dr, Milpitas

Lion Supermarket 1710 Tully Road, San Jose.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Van Tran for Senate in 2012


LSI received this URL last week but was travelling so did not have a chance to post it.

http://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/PDFGen/pdfgen.prg?filingid=1429460&amendid=0


Apparently State Assemblyman Van Tran is planning to run for State Senate in 2012. This is a recently filing of Form 410 by Tran and and David Bauer (his treasurer) on 7/7/09.

Tran is a very calculated politician so it is not suprising that he is covering all of the bases just in case. Rumor since last Friday that Tran already raised $250,000 for his war chest against Sanchez and Pham.

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