Irvine Vice Mayor Tammy Kim has pulled papers to run for AD-68 to challenge incumbent Steven Choi which would pit two Korean-American candidates against each other for this assembly seat. Kim continue to maintain a committee for a re-election bid to the City Council in 2024.
Kim is going to run on a record of anti-Asian hate initiatives she worked with the Irvine Police Department on so that incidents of Asian hate can be more easily reported. And there are other programs in which she worked hard to include multiple threshold language inclusion that increased resident participation in COVID 19 assistance programs. Those are positives.
She received more votes for City Council in Irvine than any other candidate — but her percentage of vote total was only 14.8% — the lowest of the top vote getter for city council in the last six elections. Larry Agran got 23.6% of the vote in 2010. Kim’s 43,744 in 2020 were the result of a high turnout presidential election and massive growth in the city’s population since 2010.
When Choi ran for Mayor of Irvine, many were urging Suhkee Kang — a far more popular Korean-American politician than Choi — to challenge him. But Kang wouldn’t do it for fear of dividing Irvine’s Korean-American community. Kim apparently has no issue with this and AD68 is much bigger than Irvine.
If current redistricting maps hold, parts of Anaheim Hills, Villa Park and Orange might move out of AD-68 and without these Republican strongholds, there’s a slight chance a Democratic candidate can do better.
Kim will have to overcome broken campaign promises to Vets for placing a cemetery at Anaheim Hills instead of ARDA, calling out comments from a VietNam vet as an example of white supremacy (not an asset in most of AD68 and which she added in her Veteran’s Day comments on social media that ONLY addressed the Korean War and nothing else), being against expanding the city council and being against going to district voting in defiance of the California Democratic Party’s position on local elections. And her motions to eliminate the city’s “Sunshine Ordinance” are not positive.
Additionally, the notion of racism is there when the target of the race is less than 50% of the population. Irvine is so diverse, there’s no ethnicity that’s greater than 50% so Kim’s use of the phase #whitesplaining on social media won’t go over well with part of the district outside of Irvine which doesn’t have a majority racial element. It’s not reverse racism. It’s actual racism. And there’s the “generational issue” phrase she’s used before which is “ageism.”
I know many Democrats who blanked the AD68 race in 2020 because they couldn’t stomach voting for Melissa Fox due to her flip flops on policy, her alliance with FivePoint, and her husband’s social media exploits — refusing to surrender the Democrats of Greater Irvine’s Facebook page and allegations he gaslighted followers with false Facebook profiles. Will OC Democrats do this to Kim? She has little elective experience, appears to not get “Roberts Rules of Order” and loves playing the victim card. As the AD68 is much larger territory, the Irvine Korean-American Community is divided at best.
We’ll see.