A former teacher and small business owner, Krom entered politics in 2000 to help defeat the El Toro Airport plan. She has served 10 years in local government on the Irvine city council, including four years as Irvine’s directly elected mayor.

During her term as mayor, budgets were balanced, city reserves were tripled to $30 million, and Irvine was named one of the greenest cities in the country and America’s “safest big city” four years in a row. During those same four years, incumbent Congressman John Campbell never once came to city hall, never once attended a public event, never once inquired about Irvine’s municipal priorities and couldn’t be bothered to send a letter of congratulations when Irvine was named “safest city” four years in a row.

This Congressional district is home to four coastal cities, the University of California, Irvine, and seven public school districts. It is Orange County’s job center, and it has the most culturally diverse, thoroughly integrated population anywhere in America. It’s a great district.

Unfortunately, we have a congressman who has failed the district, missing almost 275 votes in the past two years, including the vote on the “Jobs Bill” which he skipped to attend a car show in Florida. When he does vote, he votes against our interests, opposing funding for education, coastal preservation, border security, veterans benefits, small business tax credits and the arts.

Campbell chooses partisanship over leadership and defines every appropriation as an earmark. As a result, we send more tax dollars to Washington every year than all but eight of the 435 districts, and John Campbell works every day to make sure not one penny comes back — not for coastal preservation, not for student loans and research grants, not for critical infrastructure projects. Heavily supported by corporate PACs, he prefers to use his time defending offshore drilling and weakening consumer protections.

Beth Krom has a proven track record as an accessible leader who gets things done. She knows the district, and will work directly with city leaders to help support community interests.

Krom is proud to be endorsed by Laguna Beach councilmembers Toni Iseman, Jane Egly and Verna Rollinger, as well as by the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, HRC, Teachers, Nurses and Firefighters.

Editor’s Note: Rep. John Campbell, too, was asked last week to submit his own statement to Laguna Beach voters about why he is steeking re-election, but his campaign staff said he declined to participate.

Organized by UC Irvine’s political student organizations, the debate featured Democrat Beth Krom, supported by the College Democrats, all of whom were gathered outside in a large crowd at the entrance to the auditorium. Libertarian candidate Mike Binkley was also in attendance. A cardboard cutout of Republican candidate John Campbell took his place, standing next to an empty table where the College Republicans were supposed to meet.

During the debate, Krom’s statements were followed by thunderous applause as students and supporters voiced their concurrence with whooping cheers.

“If I get elected, we will have a seat at the table in Washington,” spoke Krom as she addressed the crowd, “And I always say that if you’re not at the table, then you’re on the menu.”

Krom’s platform supports public education and innovation, environmental preservation and health care reforms. She became involved in the political arena in 2000 when she ran for city council in opposition to the building of an international airport at the former El Toro Marine Corp Air Station. She won the election and was re-elected in 2002. She later ran for two terms as mayor of Irvine, and won both elections, serving a total of four years before running for city council after her terms were over.

Her opponent in this year’s race is the current Republican incumbent, John Campbell.

“Well, when I was the mayor of Irvine for four years, John Campbell never once came to city hall,” Krom said. “He never once attended public events. He never once invited me to sit down and talk about our municipal priorities and he couldn’t even be bothered to send a letter of congratulations when Irvine was named the safest city in America for four years in a row. So I knew first-hand that he was not doing the job he was elected to do.”
John Campbell was invited to participate in the 48th Congressional District debate, but for undeclared reasons, he was not present.

“After I handed the gavel over to the new mayor, I decided that I could either sit there and watch this man win by default or I could run against him because I felt that I had built the kind of credibility that would give me the platform to run,” Krom said. “I do feel that we now are seen as a very strong campaign.”

Krom continued to differ herself from Campbell.

“What I offer that the incumbent doesn’t is a record of actually having accomplishing things,” Krom said. “I have spent my time — the same 10 years that he has been in public office, I have been in public office. He never actually had to run a campaign to win any of his seats. I had to run tough races, and I feel that the public, by electing me with almost 60 percent of the vote in my second race for mayor and in the 2008 city council race, where I came in first place with more than 8,000 votes more than the 2nd place winner, the community has conveyed to me that they appreciate the effort that I put in, that they appreciate the fact that I work directly with the community, that I work without consideration for people’s partisan registration. I’ve said from the very beginning that this campaign is not about partisanship. It’s about leadership.”

With Election Day coming up quickly on Nov. 2, the race intensifies as all parties reach out for voters.

“People are rooting for us,” Krom said. “And if everybody gets out and vote on Election Day, I think there’s a good chance that we are going to make history here in the 48th Congressional District.”

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During those 10 years, Irvine has been named one of the greenest cities in the nation, one of the top ten best places to live in the country (according to Forbes Magazine), and “Safest Big City in America” six years in a row.

Click here to read how city leaders work with residents to make Irvine the best place to live in Orange County.

Campaign Ad approved by Beth Krom

But this iconic county of 3.1 million people passed something of a milestone in June. The percentage of registered Republican voters dropped to 43 percent, the lowest level in 70 years.

It was the latest sign of the demographic, ethnic and political changes that are transforming the county and challenging long-held views of a region whose colorful — its detractors might suggest zany — reputation extends well beyond the borders of this state.

At the end of 2009, nearly 45 percent of the county’s residents spoke a language other than English at home, according to county officials. Whites now make up only 45 percent of the population; this county is teeming with Hispanics, as well as Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese families. Its percentage of foreign-born residents jumped to 30 percent in 2008 from 6 percent in 1970, and visits to some of its corners can feel like a trip to a foreign land.

The demographic changes that have swept the county reflect what is happening across the state and much of the nation. It has happened slowly but surely over the course of a generation, becoming increasingly apparent not only in a drive through the 34 cities that fill this sprawling 789-square-mile county south of Los Angeles, but also, most recently, in the results of a presidential election. In 2008, Barack Obama drew 48 percent of the vote here against Senator John McCain of Arizona. (By comparison, in 1980, Jimmy Carter received just 23 percent against Ronald Reagan, the conservative hero whose election as California governor in 1966 and 1970 was boosted in no small part by the affection for him here.)

“I was a city planner in San Diego in 1960 when Orange County was just orange groves and typecast as a conservative stronghold,” said Marshall Kaplan, the executive director of the Merage Foundations, which runs educational and other programs for recent immigrants here. “It isn’t anymore. I live in Irvine. My wife is Asian. In Irvine, I sometimes feel like I’m her affirmative action program.”

Manuel Gomez, the vice chancellor of student affairs at the University of California, Irvine, said the county where he was born 63 years ago is almost unrecognizable to him today. “With diversity comes more cultural voices and political voices,” he said. “And certainly better food.”

Orange County is not unique in being a reliable Republican region in California. But this county has always boasted of a zesty political brand: almost defiantly conservative, the anti-Los Angeles, a land of gated communities and great wealth that managed to produce a steady stream of colorful conservative figures, including the televangelist Robert H. Schuller and former Representative Robert K. Dornan — B-1 Bob, as he was known, for his advocacy of military projects. (In a sign of what was to come, Mr. Dornan lost the House seat in 1996 to a Democratic Latina, Loretta Sanchez).

With such world-famous attractions as Disneyland and Mr. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral and enclaves like Laguna Beach and Balboa Island, Orange County is as much a symbol in California as it is nationally.

Indeed, to some measure, the extent of the county’s transformation may seem magnified simply because of the way people thought of it in the past. “The new Orange County is not a repudiation of the old,” said Kevin Starr, a California historian. “For all the attention paid the right-wingers there, they never really took up the whole place. They were just more mediagenic than everyone else.”

Still, by any measure, this is no longer Nixon’s Orange County.

Here in Santa Ana, a sign on a downtown furniture store the other day advertised a sale in Spanish only; nearly 95 percent of the enrollment in the public schools is Latino. The mayor of Irvine, Sukhee Kang, was born in Korea, making him the first Korean-American to run a major American city. “We have 35 languages spoken in our city,” Mr. Kang said.

A few miles away in Westminster — where Vietnamese immigrants began arriving about 30 years ago, earning the area the name Little Saigon — is a dazzling sea of Vietnamese characters on storefronts and billboards (including one for McDonald’s). “I’ve been here for 30 years,” said Kinh Tram, 59, as he sat in front of a two-story mall that was crowded with other Vietnamese immigrants. “When I first came here, most of these were open lots.”

There are pockets of deep poverty spread across a county long identified with suburban affluence and escape from urban Los Angeles. About 25 percent of residents here did not have health insurance at some point during 2009, according to a report released last week by the U.C.L.A. Center for Health Policy Research. Less than a mile from the entrance to Disneyland is a Latino enclave of low-income housing where trucks arrive every morning, with names like Yucatán Produce, to sell groceries and household goods to people who cannot afford a car to drive to the store.

Orange remains a Republican county, at least relatively: an influx of immigrants certainly does not equate to automatic Democratic gains, here or anywhere else across the country. Many Vietnamese immigrants are socially conservative and run for office as Republicans. Until the increased identification of the Republican Party with tough measures on immigration in recent years, Latino voters were also clearly in play for Republicans. Most elected officials in Orange County are Republicans.

But the political texture of this county, which is larger in population than Nevada or Iowa, is changing, and many officials say it is only a matter of time before many Republican officeholders get swept out with the tide.

While Republicans have been on a steady decline — in 1990, they made up 56 percent of the electorate — the percentage of independent voters, as in much of the state, soared to 20 percent this past June from 8.6 percent in 1990. President Obama’s strong showing here in 2008 continued a nearly 30-year pattern in which the vote for Democratic presidential candidates has steadily increased.

Mr. Tram, the Vietnamese immigrant in Westminster, said that he had voted for Mr. Obama and that he thought most of his Vietnamese friends had done the same. “The Republicans are for rich people,” he said.

A large reason for this transformation is immigration. But the changes also reflect how the regional economy has changed, with the shrinking of the aerospace industry, which supported the once dominant, mostly white middle-class community here. That has largely been taken over by service, tourism and high-tech jobs, the result being that this county is a contrast of the extremely wealthy and the lower middle class.

“It’s less of a middle-class suburb today,” said Michael M. Ruane, the director of the Orange County Community Indicators Project, which studies economic and demographic trends in the county. “You have areas of poverty and areas of great affluence and less of a middle.”

Even fans of the recent hit television series “The O.C.,” whose main characters were prosperous white residents of Newport Beach, got little hint of the diversity of the region. “The county is becoming more like California,” Mr. Ruane said. “The national image that it is an entirely conservative and entirely Republican county is wrong. Voter registration patterns and voting have shifted as a result of these demographic shifts.”

Campbell (R), who won his Congressional seat in 2005, is gearing up for one of the most formidable democratic challenges by Ms. Krom (D). The 48th district historically votes republican, although President Barack Obama narrowly won this district in 2008. A libertarian candidate, Mike Binkley, will also be on the ballot.

The 48th district includes Aliso Viejo, Dana Point, Irvine, Laguna Beach, Laguna Hills, Laguna Niguel, Laguna Woods, Lake Forest, Tustin, and parts of Newport Beach and San Juan Capistrano.

Click here to read the article.

The organization’s “grassroots all-star” endorsement is chosen by online vote – this year more than 66,000 votes were tallied – and the winner gets money, organizing and fundraising help from DFA, the grassroots group that sprang from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s failed 2004 run for president. This year’s second- and third-place winners, Massachusetts attorney Mac d’Alessandro and California teacher Bill Hedrick, will also receive DFA help.

To win, Krom beat a series of other progressive candidates who campaigned for the endorsement, including New Hampshire Democrat Ann McLane Kuster – who’s in a tight Democratic primary against the more moderate Katrina Swett – and Manan Trivedi, a physician and Iraq War veteran running against Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.).

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