Fitchburg man earns rare GOP win for state Senate
A newly elected Republican state senator from central Massachusetts — who performed the rare feat of flipping a Democratic seat in the deep-blue Bay State — is crediting his inspiring American dream background as a former refugee for his upset victory.
“It was my background that related to the voters,” Fitchburg City Councilor Dean Tran told Boston Herald Radio yesterday, “and they brought their sentiment to the polls.”
Tran won the Worcester and Middlesex Senate seat over Leominster Democrat Susan A. Chalifoux Zephir by fewer than 1,000 votes in a special election to replace Democrat Jennifer L. Flanagan, who was named to the newly formed Cannabis Control Commission earlier this year.
Tran, 42, has served on the Fitchburg City Council since 2006 and works for a software development company. He ran on a platform of low taxes, creating jobs and supporting education. As a minority party member, he vowed to work to find common ground with Democrats.
Tran emigrated as a child to the U.S. in 1980, and yesterday recounted a harrowing journey as “boat people” to America.
“My parents sold everything, saved everything they had and put us on a wooden boat,” Tran said of his family’s escape from Vietnam in 1978, a few years after the nearly two-decade war had ended. “We drifted for 12 days on the ocean, we went through a lot of stuff, people died. I remember my parents telling us they fed us salt water and stuff like that.”
Tran and his family spent two years in a refugee camp in Thailand, settling in Fitchburg in 1986.