The $254,000 that Chispa spent in this year’s most expensive U.S. House race barely registers as a drop in the proverbial bucket.
The money, which the Santa Ana-based nonprofit used to campaign for Democrat Derek Tran against two-term Republican incumbent Michelle Steel in the 45th District, represents just 0.6% of the more than $46 million raised by the candidates and independent expenditure committees.
Yet Chispa’s quarter-million-and-change — which paid for mailers, digital ads, phone bankers and canvassers targeting Latino voters in a district that swings from Brea to southern Los Angeles County and ends in Little Saigon — might prove one of the most consequential sums dropped in Orange County politics in decades.