June 17, 2016
Iranian-American Ron Varasteh won a primary election nod last week to run against the Republican incumbent in California’s 45th Congressional District in Orange County this fall.
But Varasteh will have a serious challenge as the GOP vote in the primary far exceeded the Democratic total despite the fact that the Democratic presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders drew out many Democrats while the GOP primary was an afterthought with only one candidate left standing there, Donald Trump.
California’s congressional primaries are now open elections with all candidates running in one primary regardless of party. Only Washington State operates a similar system. The two top candidates in the primary then run against each other in November, even if both are from the same party.
In the 45th Congressional District, Republican incumbent Mimi Walters was challenged by another Republican, Greg Raths, and two Democrats—both of them Iranian-Americans—Varasteh and Max Gouron. The results were as follows:
Walters (R) 47,136 41.3%
Varasteh (D) 31,042 27.2%
Raths (R) 21,721 19.0%
Gouron (D) 14,279 12.5%
The two Republicans combined thus passed 60 percent while the Democrats were short of 40 percent.
Walters first won election two years ago with 65 percent of the vote. The incumbent Republican retired that year.
The 45th District lies entirely within Orange County, which has a large concentration of Iranian-Americans, probably the largest concentration in the country.
Varasteh, 52, was born in San Francisco and now lives in Irvine. He ran for Congress in 2012 in another Orange County district, winning 39 percent of the vote against another incumbent Republican, Dana Rorabacher,
Varasteh was expected to beat Gouron as Varasteh had the endorsements of the California Democratic Party, the Democratic Party of Orange County, the Orange County Young Democrats and the Progressive Democrats of America.
He got his BS in electrical engineering and an MS in computer engineering from California State University at Fullerton. He has been a small business owner in Orange County for more than 30 years.
If elected, he would be the first Iranian-American to serve in the US Congress.
The primary system adopted in the last decade by Washington State and then California is designed to combat the trend to more extreme candidates in both major parties.
With state legislatures drawing district lines to concentrate Democrats in some districts and Republicans in others, there is less party competition in the November elections. In many districts, the only threat to an incumbent comes from within his or her own party in a primary. Since primary voters in both parties tend to be more extreme—more conservative in the Republican Party and more liberal in the Democratic Party—candidates are driven further left or right to discourage potential challengers in a primary.
The California/Washington system, however, counters that tendency. In a heavily GOP district, for example, where two Republicans top the primary, Democrats will vote for the more centrist Republican in the fall. That tends to push the GOP more to the center.
