Hong Tran

In 2012, Tran became a candidate for King County Superior Court Judge, Department 29, running against senior deputy prosecutor Sean O'Donnell. A controversy arose over the King County Bar Association's rating of Tran as "not qualified" despite her experience in legal work; several state and local judges questioned the accuracy of the rating. In the August 7th primary election, Tran lost with 23.11% of the vote against O'Donnell's share of 76.89% of the vote.

After graduation, she decided to continue providing legal services to the underprivileged and received a fellowship to work at Legal Services of North Carolina. After her fellowship, she moved to Spokane Legal Services where she specialized in child custody cases involving abusive relationships for a year. In 1996, she began working at the Northwest Justice Project in Seattle. The next 10 years were at the Northwest Justice Project; the first eight were as a Staff Attorney working on advocacy for affordable housing and individuals facing housing discrimination or eviction, including co-authoring briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court. Between 2004 and 2006, when she resigned her position to campaign, she was an Advocacy Coordinator, mentoring new attorneys and supporting other advocates at her organization.

Tran earned a Bachelor of Arts from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, in 1988. After taking a year off to earn money for tuition, she attended law school at the University of Utah College of Law, receiving her Juris Doctor in 1992. Tran's start in the non-profit legal services field started during law school, when she began volunteering at Utah Legal Services, a nonprofit agency providing free civil legal services to low-income families. There she specialized in payday loans, fair debt collection, unemployment compensation, child custody, and domestic violence issues.

Tran's family lived in Saigon, South Vietnam from her birth until they fled the country during the fall of her home city to the Communist forces in the spring of 1975, when she was almost eight years old. They escaped on a boat, then were picked up by a US Navy vessel. They were moved through various refugee camps, eventually making it to the United States, and settling in Orlando, Florida.

Hong Thi Tran (born May 5, 1966) was a candidate in the Washington Democratic Party primary election for the United States Senate in 2006, challenging incumbent Maria Cantwell. Tran received more than five percent of the Democratic vote, and her differing views from those of Maria Cantwell (on the Iraq War in particular) drew the attention of the news media and local progressives. Tran is the first Vietnamese American in the state to run for U.S. Senate, and possibly the first in the country to do so, according to Carol Vu of the Northwest Asian Weekly, who considered Tran's campaign to be "historic."

Both media reports and Tran's campaign press releases highlighted the lack of support provided to Tran by the state Democratic party leadership, such as restricting her access to the party's voter database and refusing to let her bring campaign signs into a Coordinated Campaign event at Whittier Elementary. Tran claimed that the party leadership was preventing the distribution of information about her campaign to Democratic voters and PCOs in an attempt to control the primary results; party chair Dwight Pelz and spokesman Kelly Steele claimed that her campaign didn't have enough resources to utilize the information in the voter database. Despite these differences with the party leadership, Tran was able to win the sole endorsement of Cantwell's home district, the 32nd Legislative District, and shared endorsements with Cantwell in three other legislative districts, the 40th, 25th, and 26th LDs.