The $254,000 Chispa spent on the most expensive U.S. House race this year can hardly be considered a drop in the ocean.
The money the Santa Ana-based nonprofit used to campaign for Democrats Derek Tran against two-term Republican incumbent Michelle Steel in the 45th Districtrepresents just 0.6% of the more than $46 million raised by candidates and independent expenditure committees.
Still, Chispa’s quarter-million-and-change — which paid for mailers, digital ads, phone bankers and canvassers targeting Latino voters in a district that stretches from Brea to southern Los Angeles County and ends in Little Saigon — would may turn out to be one of the most consequential. The money in Orange County politics has declined in decades.
If Tran wins the incredibly tight race, then he will 480 votes from now on before Steel columnas publication – the first candidate will have won back a seat in the House of Representatives for the Democrats, making the once undoubtedly a red province with one GOP congressman.
Chispa, founded in 2017 to train young Latinos to create progressive change, will have seen success beyond its base for the first time, demonstrating that OC is entering a new political era – despite MAGA’s takeover of Washington.
In the 24 years I’ve written about my hometown, I’ve seen local Latino activists fundamentally change their attitudes toward electoral politics. Those I grew up with largely shunned politics, out of a sense of progressive purity. But ultimately, they followed the lead of a new generation that pushed elected officials to take on issues like immigrant rights and government transparency.
Now I see the newest crop of benefactors helping with successful campaigns or even running for office. Most of this evolution has taken place in Santa Ana, which has changed from a city-run city centrist democrat Latinos towards a progressive beacon with a municipal council that calls for just as much a bilateral ceasefire in Palestine and Israel as for declare itself a sanctuary city.
OC Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento thought Chispa was a “disassembled group of young people” when he served on the Santa Ana City Council for the past decade. But he was suitably impressed by their advocacy for things like police reform rent control to offer their help his successful 2020 mayoral campaign And surveillance run two years later.
“They started with policy,” said Sarmiento, who donated $5,000 to Chispa’s eponymous PAC. “Then they realized they could help candidates. They realized that they had confidence in the community because they had delivered on big promises.”
Tran’s team declined to comment on Chispa’s efforts in the 45th, which wasn’t surprising: Political campaigns are not allowed to communicate with independent expenditure committees. But Chispa’s involvement in the race shows that santaneros can apply their strategies outside their hometown – and win.
Democrat Derek Tran, who hopes to dethrone Republican Rep. Michelle Steel in California’s 45th Congressional District, center, has lunch in August with supporters including Westminster City Councilman Carlos Manzo, right, at Carrot and Daikon Banh Mi in Westminster
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
I spoke with four staffers earlier this week – founder and executive director Hairo Cortes, director of operations Jennifer Rojas, policy director Boomer Vicente and communications director Hector Bustos. They are such kids that both Vicente and Bustos were terrified “before my time” when I asked about the Santa Ana City Council races of 20 years ago.
However, their youth belies resumes worthy of a political machine.
Cortes, 32, cut his teeth organizing undocumented youth like himself shortly after graduating from Santa Ana High. Vicente, 29, filed for a seat in the Assembly in 2022while Bustos – the youngest at 25 – won his seat on the Santa Ana Unified school board that year. Rojas, also 32, was an organizer for the ACLU for seven years before joining them in 2023.
Chispa — which means “spark” in Spanish and is also the name of a popular dating app for Latinos — is registered as a 501(c)(4), unlike the OC’s other prominent progressive nonprofits. This allows the group to support candidates and organize independent expenditures. Cortes said he had political power in mind after the election The Santa Ana police union began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every election cycle to put their preferred candidates on the City Council.
“We realized that we couldn’t continue to do our policy work with just one election, where everything we had worked on would be reversed,” he said.
Progressives took over the Santa Ana City Council and school board in 2022, thanks in part to Chispa and other groups. That alliance helped last year Councilwoman Jessie Lopez defeats a recall effort where she was eliminated 8-1. Chispa leaders planned to focus on Santa Ana again – until the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
“We were texting on a group call,” Cortes said with a bitter laugh. “’This is a disaster, this is bad, we are f…’”
He knew that Orange County had several tight congressional races that could determine control of Congress. So he talked to allies about whether Chispa should wade into those confrontations. One person he spoke to was Mehran Khodabandeh, development director of the California chapter of the Working Families Party and a longtime political strategist. Khodabandeh suggested Chispa create a super PAC and focus on one race.
“I said to Hairo, ‘You all have the bona fides and you have the trust of your community, so why? not Are you doing this?’” Khodabandeh said. “They didn’t need anyone to say, ‘I can do the work for you, pay me.’ They needed someone to give them money so they could do it themselves.”
Chispa focused on the 45th because it bordered Santa Ana, and Rep. Steel – born in South Korea – had has long been an outspoken critic of illegal immigration. They saw that Latinos made up 30% of the district’s population, yet were ignored by both Staal and Democrats. Cortes and his colleagues had never been involved in a political action committee, so they relied on people like Khodabandeh for advice.
I asked the four whether creating a super PAC — long decried by good government types as a violation of democracy — violated their values.
“We know it’s dirty,” Vicente said. “But we realized that in order to play this game, we have to make these (independent expenditures).”
“Without engaging in fundraising, we are not leveraging the same level of power as our opponents,” Rojas added.
“And it will happen with or without us,” Bustos concluded.
Santa Ana Unified School District trustee and Chispa communications director Hector Bustos poses for a portrait in Santa Ana. He and other members of the nonprofit helped elevate the Latino vote for Democrat Derek Tran in his campaign for Republican Michelle Steel’s 45th congressional district seat.
(Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times)
They did most of their work from home. ‘We are young. We don’t need to be in an office,” Cortes said — coordinating with some of the other PACs that donated millions of dollars to support Tran against Steel. Their connections with local activists made it easy for them to find volunteers. But Chispa quickly realized they had to adapt to their new terrain, Vicente said.
In previous campaigns in Santa Ana, “we talked about all the good things we had done,” Vicente said. “Before the 45th we talked about some Derek could Doing. The problems were also different. In Santa Ana you talk about police accountability. In the 45th century, drug pricing was important.”
Do they think Chispa has made a difference?
Vicente pulled statistics on his smartphone: 166,532 phone calls. 18,348 text messages. There were 12,928 doors knocked. 5,745 voters who said they would choose Tran.
“Derek can’t win without the Latino vote,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Those are people we talked to.”
“All the organizations on the ground have played a big role in where we are today,” Rojas acknowledged. “But given how small the margins are, our work plays a role in that.”
“We lacked this knowledge for young people to run PACs,” Bustos said. “Well, we did it – and I hope more people here do their own thing.”
After I met the chispitasI drove to the office of Unite Here Local 11 in Garden Grove, which also helped Tran. In a gazebo, Joesé Hernández, director of Chispa’s field program, gave a pep talk to his team of pollsters, who were going to “cure” votes — visit people whose ballots had initially been disqualified to let them know they could fix the mistake.
Hernández is a veteran of Santa Ana’s activist scene, working on local campaigns and the like Orange County co-regional director for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. I first met him ten years ago, when he was part of Occupy Santa Ana and a volunteer for the Santa Ana-based nonprofit El Centro Cultural de México.
“The idea of banning money from politics was naive,” the 40-year-old told me earlier that day. “That’s just not the reality we live in, and it’s not going away anytime soon. So we’re going to get into a gunfight with fists? No, we have to come up with enough money to fight.’
Hernández was less boxy towards the canvassers.
“The 45th would amount to a Latino engagement,” he told the five Latinas, some of whom came from as far away as Perris. They ate chips and drank coffee to warm up in the evening cold. “Many people we spoke to had never been approached by a politician. There was extreme cynicism. But we reached out.”
The women nodded.
“That’s the nice thing about this team,” Hernández said with a smile. “We’re not new to trouble, we’re new to this game. But those voters we reached out to see themselves in us, and we see ourselves in them.”
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