“This is a district that was created for Vietnamese Americans and people know that,” Derek Tran of California told Lovett, a video shows

Democratic congressional candidate Derek Tran told “Obama Bro” podcaster Jon Lovett that his Korean-American opponent, Rep. Michelle Steel (R., Calif.), is “not the right choice” for the district because of her race. Lovett edited the remark from the published podcast and transcript.

“But you know, we always knew (sic) that Steel wasn’t the right choice for the district. You know, she's Korean-American,” Tran told Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama and host of the political show Podcast Love it or leave it. “This is a district created for Vietnamese Americans, and people know that.”

The mid-October remark, which was captured by a viewer on a video released by the Washington Free Beaconwas a response to Lovett's question to Tran about why his congressional campaign in Southern California recently went from favoring Steel, who will be elected in 2022, to making a mistake.

The podcast and transcript were released on October 19th and the official video was posted to YouTube two days later. But Tran's racist comment was edited out of every public version.

“But we always knew that Steel didn’t fit in the district. And people know that,” Tran said in the publicly available recording. Between sentences, the camera switched to a close-up, allowing a part to be edited out seamlessly.

Tran's firing of Steel because of her ethnicity follows months of criticism over how he and his supporters have spoken about their race and heritage, and comes at a time when their competition for a heavily Asian district has stalled. The Cook Political Report said last month that the contest was a toss-up.

In May, the Vietnamese told Tran Punchbowl news that Steel's background would not resonate with the district's Vietnamese community. Steel's parents fled North Korea for South Korea, where the Republican was born, although she grew up in Japan and eventually emigrated to the United States.

“Michelle still claims she is a refugee or that she was trying to escape communism. No, that’s not true at all,” Tran said. “She came to this country for economic reasons. This is not the same as losing your country and no longer having a home after the fall of Saigon in 1975.”

Dozens of state and local officials and four Korean American groups responded to the comment with a sharp rebuke in a letter released by the Steel campaign, writing that Tran “needs to run a better campaign or get out of the race.”

Separately, Tran repeated the same rhetoric on Thursday.

“She comes into our community and tells us, 'I know what it's like to be an immigrant like all of you,'” Tran said New York Times. “No, you don’t. You didn’t lose your country.”

In February, a local Democratic leader published an interview with Tran and noted that the challenger's English was “perfect.” He urged readers to compare it to Steel's, calling her Korean accent “incomprehensible after 50 years in America, an intelligence thing, I guess.”

Representatives for Tran and Crooked Media, which produce Lovett's podcast, did not respond to requests for comment.

According to 2022 census data, more than a third of Steel District residents were born outside the United States, and Asians represent the largest ethnic bloc. While Spanish is the most widely spoken primary language, nearly 105,000 households speak Vietnamese at home and about 42,000 speak it Korean.