SAN JOSE, Calif. - For years after Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, the tiny contingent of Vietnamese emigres in the United States who chose to join the Democratic Party stayed quiet.
"Many in the Vietnamese community felt Democrats were just too soft on communism and too weak on defense," recalls Minh Steven Dovan, a San Jose attorney who says he rarely told fellow members of the emigre community that he was a registered Democrat. Other emigres say that some Republican Vietnamese went as far as dubbing the Democrats in their midst "communist sympathizers."
But more than three decades after communist tanks rolled into Saigon, young Vietnamese-Americans are abandoning the Republican Party in droves, according to a San Jose Mercury News computer analysis of nearly 30,000 new Santa Clara County voters. By plugging Vietnamese surnames into a data base, the analysis shows that Vietnamese-Americans age 30 and under are registering Democratic over Republican by nearly 4 to 1...
