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FALLS CHURCH, Virginia—On a warm Sunday this month at the Eden Center, a strip mall that serves as a hub for Virginia’s Vietnamese American community, storefronts were decked in posters backing former President Donald Trump and Republican Hung Cao, who is running a longshot campaign to oust Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine.
There was not a single sign for Vice President Kamala Harris, who is currently polling six points ahead of Trump in Virginia.
In the parking lot, where American and South Vietnamese flags fly side by side, people stopped by a tent covered in Trump and Cao paraphernalia. At one point, speakers blasted “Eating the Cats,” a viral song parodying Trump’s comments during the Sept. 10 presidential debate, in which he repeated the false claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets.
It was not the only piece of misinformation that echoed through the Eden Center. Beside the tent, people who traced their origins to China, Thailand, and Vietnam described the United States under Democratic leadership as a “one-party system” and alleged that “Kamala Harris just opened the border and let people [in].”
All were excited about the candidacy of Cao, a former U.S. Navy captain who would be the first Vietnamese American senator if elected on Nov. 5. “The Vietnamese stick together,” said Ken Pham, 52, a martial arts instructor from nearby Annandale who said that he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and plans to do so again this year. “We support our own.”
A tent decorated with signs supporting the Republican party’s presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, as well as GOP downballot candidates in Virginia is seen in the parking lot of the Eden Center in Falls Church, Virginia, on Oct. 20. Allison Meakem photo for Foreign Policy
Virginia has not elected a Republican statewide candidate to national office in two decades, and that seems unlikely to change this year—even as Trump has insisted that the state is in play. Neither presidential campaign has spent much money in the state.
“It is a safe democratic election,” said David Ramadan, a professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a former Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates.
Still, Cao’s historic candidacy underscores the potential political power of Virginia’s Vietnamese Americans. The community numbers around 77,000, making it the fifth-largest in the United States. Most members trace their roots to the fall of Saigon in 1975, when thousands of refugees resettled in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Many “had some sort of tie with the U.S. government,” said Elizabeth Morton, a consultant and lecturer at George Washington University who directed a historiography project on Virginia’s Little Saigon.
Virginia owes much of its recent blue transformation to its rapidly urbanizing northern region, which is disproportionately affluent, educated, and multicultural. The Eden Center sits in the 8th Congressional District, which has sent Democrats to Congress since 1990; Rep. Don Beyer won in 2022 with nearly 74 percent of the vote. While many of the area’s diverse communities have driven its leftward shift, the reality among Vietnamese Americans is more complex.
Vietnamese refugee Tran Thuong Huy (center) stands with teenage Vietnamese Americans in a neighborhood in Arlington on Feb. 1, 1985.Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
Nationally, Vietnamese Americans gravitate to the right compared to other Asian American voters. A 2023 study from the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of registered Vietnamese American voters leaned toward the Republican Party, while 42 percent leaned Democratic; Vietnamese Americans were the only Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) constituency to lean Republican. They are also politically active—91 percent of Vietnamese American voters plan to vote this year, according to the 2024 AAPI Voter Survey.
In an election that has seen Trump make gains among nonwhite voters, these trends are a reminder that the Democratic Party cannot take the support of diverse communities for granted. They might also be a harbinger of the nuanced, multiracial U.S. democracy of the future: Asian Americans are the fastest-growing population group in the United States, and the number of Vietnamese Americans grew by 32 percent between 2010 and 2020.
In Virginia, the Vietnamese American community is more politically divided than the displays at the Eden Center suggest. “Not seeing pro-Harris stations out there doesn’t mean that there’s not strong support for her,” said Erin Phuong Steinhauer, a Falls Church resident and the president of the Vietnam Society, a D.C.-based nonprofit that celebrates Vietnamese culture. “The Trump side is the louder of the two.”
Steinhauer chalks up the community’s sympathy for the Republican Party to history and misinformation. Many Vietnamese Americans “came here really having deep bitterness against the communist Vietnamese government,” she said. “So for some reason … they believe that the Republican Party is more anti-communist than the Democratic Party.”
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Cao, who was born in Vietnam and also ran for Congress in 2022, has made anti-communism central to his Senate campaign. “The stuff that Tim Walz and Kamala Harris are pushing is extremely communist in nature,” he told Foreign Policy, pointing to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, gun control, and gender-affirming policies for LGBTQ+ youth.
“That’s why I’m running for office, because I’m seeing this country turn into what I ran away from,” Cao said, adding that the “entire Vietnamese American community” sympathizes with his crusade. “I’m basically the standard bearer for a lot of them.”
Democrats beg to differ. “Vietnamese Americans aren’t homogenous,” said a source close to the Kaine campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the race candidly, “but I personally have not encountered anybody in all the political events I’ve done with [Sen. Kaine] who comes out and directly has said that,” referring to Cao’s claim that Democrats are communists.
Cao speaks during a rally for Trump in Chesapeake, Virginia, on June 28. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Cao and Kaine have clashed on nearly every issue in their race. Cao blames many of the United States’ woes—including inflation—on the Biden administration’s immigration policy. In an Oct. 2 debate, Cao echoed Trump’s pledge to deport all undocumented immigrants in the country, while Kaine voiced support for expanding legal pathways to immigration.
Kaine, who serves on the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, is a strong proponent of U.S. global engagement, including via aid for Ukraine and Taiwan. Despite his military background, Cao has offered few specifics on foreign policy aside from voicing strong support for Israel and skepticism over unchecked U.S. funding for Ukraine.
Staunch anti-communist views were once the “mainstream” among Vietnamese Americans, said Thuan Le Elston, a journalist who was born in Saigon and has lived in northern Virginia since 1997. Elston, the copy chief for the opinion section at USA Today, said that changed after 1993, when U.S. President Bill Clinton normalized ties with Vietnam, allowing many Vietnamese Americans to visit, do business, and begin the process of reconciliation.
Today, Elston said, voices like Cao are on “the fringe”—but they are amplified in part by conspiracy theories that spread online, especially among older voters. Those supporting Trump at the Eden Center skewed older and cited Fox News, Newsmax, and the social media site X as some of their top news sources.
The broader political fault line among Vietnamese American voters might be generational. “Among the younger generation, it seems to me that there’s a lot of participation and actively seeking out information,” Elston said. “The war is a very distant memory for many people.” The majority of Vietnamese Americans over 50 identify as Republican, while most of those who are younger lean Democratic, according to Pew data.
Regardless of affiliation, Vietnamese Americans who spoke to Foreign Policy said that they consider the economy to be a top issue this election cycle—particularly inflation and costs for families and small businesses. “Gas go up, everything go up, groceries, people cannot afford,” Pham said. “Once you get out of the house, you spend a lot of money.”
Democrats have seen support among the community for better access to higher education and job training programs, as well as abortion rights, the source close to the Kaine campaign said. “A good number of conservative Vietnamese Americans say they actually are voting for Tim Kaine,” they said. “A lot of it comes down to … women’s reproductive health.” Cao, by contrast, has likened abortion to the Holocaust.
Cao’s platform and incendiary rhetoric have ultimately struggled to find broad appeal among Virginians, and his campaign has been beset by some controversy. When a newspaper in Staunton, Virginia, reported that funds from Cao’s super PAC didn’t go to support local candidates, he called the outlet “podunk.” In June, USA Today reported that Cao misrepresented aspects of his military service record—a central campaign talking point.
Women watch from a salon as Trump’s motorcade arrives to the Eden Center in Falls Church on Aug. August 26. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Kaine leads Cao by 13 percentage points among likely Virginia voters, according to an Oct. 19-23 survey conducted by the Schar School and the Washington Post. Cao’s war chest also pales in comparison to Kaine’s: In the second quarter of 2024, Kaine’s campaign raised $16 million to Cao’s $3 million.
While Democrats will almost certainly carry both the presidential and Senate races in Virginia, Ramadan still characterized Virginia as a “purple” state, in part because it is led by a Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin. Virginia voters can be malleable when presented with statewide Republican candidates who appear moderate and distance themselves from Trump, as Youngkin did during his 2021 campaign.
But “[w]hen you when have an immigrant, regardless of this success and all-American story, running and playing on those same stupid, racist, nationalist trends of the party, it’s not going to bode well,” Ramadan said of Cao.
Trump visited the Eden Center on a campaign stop in August with Cao by his side, perhaps underscoring this counterproductive strategy. “Somehow, I don’t know what it is, you’ll have to explain it, but the Vietnamese community loves me. I love them,” Trump said to an invite-only crowd gathered at a restaurant.
Even as many Vietnamese Americans expressed enthusiasm about Trump’s visit, the event turned others off. “It actually upset me a lot,” Steinhauer said. “He was so condescending to the Vietnamese in the room. He knows nothing about us. And he also doesn’t care about the people at Eden Center.”