Two other Iranian-Americans were seeking election Tuesday to the US Congress. But both were overwhelmingly defeated by entrenched incumbents.
They were Ron Varasteh, who was running as a Democrat against
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher in Orange County, California, and Sohrob (Rob) Sobhani, who was running as an independent against Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin in Maryland.
The two incumbents won without even working up a sweat.
The two challengers took very different approaches. In Maryland,
WASHINGTON
Sobhani was spending huge sums to challenge, while in California Varasteh only mounted a very token campaign.
The sole Iranian-American victor was in the 48th Legislative
District of Washington State where Democrat Cyrus Habib, 31, a blind Rhodes Scholar, was garnering 60 percent of the vote and Republican Hank Myers 40 percent before the Iran Times went to press.
The district is generally Democratic, so it would have been an upset for Habib to lose. The district is in King County, and directly across Lake Washington from Seattle.
The two men ran against each other in the August open primary where Habib got 56 percent and Myers 44 percent, with no other candidates on the ballot. So, this week’s election was essentially a re-run and Habib was doing even better the second time around.
Habib, 31, is a lawyer assisting startup technology firms with their early stage legal needs. Born in Maryland, he grew up in the Seattle suburbs and lost his eyesight to a rare form of cancer at the age of eight. He has suffered two other bouts with cancer as well.
After a year at Oxford on a 2003 Rhodes Scholarship, Habib went to Yale Law School where he served as editor of the law review. He describes himself as moving “from Braille to Yale.” He does not mention his ethnicity on his campaign website.
In 2008, Habib’s mother, Susan Amini, ran unsuccessfully for King County Superior Court judge. His father works for Boeing.
MARYLAND
Sohrob (Rob) Sobhani, 52, poured his own money into his independent candidacy for the US Senate in Maryland.
But, to no one’s surprise, he fell short. Still, he won notice because he pulled a larger percentage of the vote than any other independent candidate ever running for senator in Maryland.
With a nearly complete count, the incumbent Democratic senator, Ben Cardin, cruised to victory with 54 percent of the vote to 28 percent for Republican Dan Bongino, 17 percent for Sobhani and 1 percent for a Libertarian party candidate.
A poll at the end of September showed Sobhani might actually outrun the GOP candidate, but it didn’t turn out that way in the end.
Sobhani announced only in September that he would challenge Cardin, who was seeking a second six-year term. No one paid much attention at the time, including Republican Bongino, a political novice who left a career with the Secret Service to take on Cardin.
But then a Gonzales poll released September 26 showed Sobhani with 21 percent and Bongino with 22 percent. That raised eyebrows since no independent running for the Senate in Maryland had ever topped 13 percent of the vote. Perhaps the poll was a fluke. But politicians in Maryland began paying attention.
In the end, Sobhani polled 17 percent, a record for an independent running a Senate race in the state. That was an interesting, if dubious, distinction. How did Sobhani do so well?
Money is likely a factor. The candidates’ financial reports filed in October showed how much they had spent through the end of September. That revealed that Sobhani had already expended $4.6 million, more than his Democratic and Republican opponents combined.
It might also have been ideology. Sobhani came at the campaign from the hardline right, and seemed to be appealing to the Republican base in ways that the more moderate Bongino could not.
It might also be timing. Sobhani began running television ads in September, before either of his opponents went onto TV. Thus, when the Gonzales poll was taken, many of those polled had only heard about Sobhani.
Sobhani has run for the US Senate twice before, in 1992 and 2000, both times as a Republican. And both times he lost in the GOP primary. It appears, however, that he learned something about campaigning from those defeats.
There was another race in Maryland with an Iranian tie. Kenneth Timmerman, who has been active in support of the opposition to the Islamic Republic, was the Republican nominee in the 8th District.
He faced incumbent Democrat Chris Van Hollen, who is part of the Democratic leadership in Congress. Van Hollen is widely believed to be entrenched and unbeatable in his district.
Van Hollen was easily re-elected with 60 percent to Timmerman’s 36 percent and 4 percent for others.
Timmerman, 58, is president of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran. He was also the chief investigator for the 9/11 families in the lawsuit they filed against the Islamic Republic. He is a frequent writer of commentaries about Iran, a number of which have appeared in the Iran Times.
CALIFORNIA
Iranian-American Ron Varasteh won the Democratic nomination last summer to run against GOP incumbent, Dana Rohrabacher in California’s 48th Congressional District. But that is a solid GOP district. With vote count not yet complete when the Iran Times went to press, Rohrabacher was sailing home with 64 percent of the vote to only 36 percent for Varasteh.
Varasteh raised barely any money to fund his campaign and did not appear as a serious candidate.
As of his September 30 official campaign report, Varasteh had raised a mere $6,656, a drop in the bucket given that the average winning congressional campaign in 2008 cost just under $1.1 million.
The June primary results suggested Varasteh would be lucky to get one-third of the vote. In California’s new open primary system, Rohrabacher was the sole Republican running and got 66 percent of the vote. Varasteh was the sole Democrat in the race and got 29 percent while independent Alan Schlar took the remaining 5 percent and was not on the ballot this week. So, Varasteh was on his way to improving his results with a very modest campaign.
Rohrabacher, who was once a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, is a very conservative Republican who has taken a great deal of interest in the Middle East. He has long supported the Mojahedin-e Khalq, often spoken in the group’s behalf and vocally advocated its removal from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
But Varasteh did not raise that issue in the campaign material published on his website.
The congressional district has a large number of Iranian-Americans. The district is located entirely in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, and runs along the coast taking in such communities as Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach and Laguna Beach.
Varasteh doesn’t say anything about his Iranian ethnicity on his website. He was, however, born in San Francisco, where he grew up. He now lives in Irvine, where the political center is far to the right of that in notoriously liberal San Francisco.