These young Latinos backed Derek Tran against Michelle Steel

The $254,000 that Chispa spent in this year’s most expensive U.S. House race barely registers as a drop in the proverbial bucket.

The money, which the Santa Ana-based nonprofit used to campaign for Democrat Derek Tran against two-term Republican incumbent Michelle Steel in the 45th District, represents just 0.6% of the more than $46 million raised by the candidates and independent expenditure committees.

Yet Chispa’s quarter-million-and-change — which paid for mailers, digital ads, phone bankers and canvassers targeting Latino voters in a district that swings from Brea to southern Los Angeles County and ends in Little Saigon — might prove one of the most consequential sums dropped in Orange County politics in decades.

If Tran wins the incredibly tight race — he’s 480 votes ahead of Steel as of this columna’s publication — the first-time candidate will have clawed back a House seat for the Democrats, leaving the once redoubtably red county with one GOP congressmember.

Chispa, founded in 2017 to train young Latinos to push for progressive change, will have succeeded outside its base for the first time, showing that O.C. is entering a new political era — despite MAGA’s takeover of Washington.

In the 24 years I’ve written about my birthplace, I’ve seen local Latino activists fundamentally transform their attitude toward electoral politics. Those I came of age with largely eschewed politics, out of a sense of progressive purity. But they eventually followed the lead of a new generation that pushed elected officials to take up causes like immigrant rights and government transparency.

Now, I’m seeing the latest batch of do-gooders help on successful campaigns or even run for office themselves. Most of this evolution has happened in Santa Ana, which has shifted from a city run by centrist Democrat Latinos to a progressive beacon with a City Council that is as apt to call for a bilateral cease-fire in Palestine and Israel as to declare itself a sanctuary city.

O.C. Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento thought Chispa was an “unassembled group of young people” when he served on the Santa Ana City Council last decade. But he was impressed enough with their advocacy on matters like police reform and rent control to use their help on his successful 2020 mayoral campaign and supervisorial 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 they had trust in the community because they had delivered on big promises.”

Tran’s team declined to comment about Chispa’s efforts in the 45th, which wasn’t surprising: Political campaigns aren’t allowed to communicate with independent expenditure committees. But Chispa’s involvement in the race shows that santaneros can take their strategies outside their hometown — and win.

I caught up with four staffers — founder and executive director Hairo Cortes, operations director Jennifer Rojas, policy director Boomer Vicente and communications director Hector Bustos — earlier this week. They’re such kids that both Vicente and Bustos deadpanned “before my time” when I asked about Santa Ana council races from 20 years ago.

Their youth, however, belies resumes worthy of a political machine.

The 32-year-old Cortes cut his teeth organizing undocumented youth like himself soon after graduating from Santa Ana High. Vicente, 29, ran for an Assembly seat in 2022, while Bustos — the youngest at 25 — won his Santa Ana Unified school board seat that year. Rojas, also 32, was an ACLU organizer 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 — registered as a 501(c)(4), unlike other prominent O.C. progressive nonprofits. That allows the group to endorse candidates and organize independent expenditures. Cortes said he had political power in mind after the Santa Ana police union began to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each election cycle to put their favored candidates on the City Council.

“We realized that we couldn’t keep doing policy work only for one election to roll back everything we had worked on,” he said.

Progressives took over the Santa Ana City Council and school board in 2022, thanks in part to Chispa and other groups. Last year, that alliance helped Councilmember Jessie Lopez defeat a recall attempt where she was outspent 8-1. Chispa leaders were planning to focus on Santa Ana again — until the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

“We were texting on a group thread,” Cortes said with a bitter laugh. “’This is a disaster, this is bad, we’re f—.’”

He knew 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 face-offs. One person he hit up was Mehran Khodabandeh, development director for the Working Families Party’s California chapter and a longtime political strategist. Khodabandeh suggested that Chispa create a super PAC and focus on one race.

“I told Hairo, ‘Y’all have the bona fides and you have the trust of your community, so why don’t you do this?’” Khodabandeh said. “They didn’t need someone to say, ‘I can do the work for you — pay me.’ They needed someone to give them money to do it for themselves.”

Chispa focused on the 45th because it bordered Santa Ana, and Rep. Steel — who was born in South Korea — had long been a vocal critic of illegal immigration. They saw that Latinos were 30% of the district’s population yet ignored by both Steel and Democrats. Cortes and his colleagues had never been involved with a political action committee, so they leaned on people like Khodabandeh for advice.

I asked the four if creating a super PAC — long decried by good government types as befouling democracy — violated their values.

“We know it’s dirty,” Vicente said. “But we realized that in order to play this game, we need to do these [independent expenditures].”

“Without us engaging in that fundraising, we are not harnessing the same level of power that our opponents have been driving,” Rojas added.

“And it’s going to happen with or without us,” Bustos concluded.

They did most of the work from home — “We’re young. We don’t need to be in an office,” Cortes cracked — and coordinated with some of the other PACs that poured millions of dollars to support Tran against Steel. Connections with local activists allowed them to easily find volunteers. But Chispa quickly realized they had to adapt to their new terrain, Vicente said.

In previous Santa Ana campaigns, “we talked about all the good stuff we had done,” Vicente said. “For the 45th, we talked about what Derek could do. The issues were different, too. In Santa Ana, you talk police accountability. In the 45th, drug pricing was important.”

Do they think Chispa made a difference?

Vicente pulled up stats on his smartphone: 166,532 phone calls. 18,348 texts. 12,928 doors knocked. 5,745 voters who said they were going to pick Tran.

“Derek cannot win without the Latino vote,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Those are folks that we talked to.”

“All of the orgs on the ground played a big role in where we’re at,” Rojas acknowledged. “But considering 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 do their own here.”

After I talked to the chispitas, I drove to the offices of Unite Here Local 11 in Garden Grove, which also helped Tran. Inside a gazebo, Chispa field program director Joesé Hernández gave a pep talk to his team of canvassers, who were going to “cure” votes — visit people whose ballots were initially disqualified to let them know they could fix the error.

Hernández is a veteran of Santa Ana’s activist scene, working on local campaigns and as Orange County co-regional director for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run. I first met him a decade 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 to kick out money out of politics was naive,” the 40-year-old told me earlier that day. “That’s just not the reality that we exist in, and it’s not going away anytime soon. So we come into a gunfight with fists? No, we need to come in with enough money to fight.”

Hernández was less pugilistic in front of the canvassers.

“The 45th was going to come down to Latino engagement,” he told the five Latinas, some of whom had come from as far away as Perris. They snacked on chips and sipped on coffee to warm up in the evening chill. “A lot of people we spoke to had never been approached by any politician. There was extreme cynicism. But we reached out.”

The women nodded.

“That’s the cool thing about this team,” Hernández said, smiling. “We’re not new to the issues but new to this game. But those voters we reached out to see themselves in us, and we see ourselves in them.”