HOUSTON , TX (TIP): Indian American Sri Preston Kulkarni finished first in the Democratic primary in Texas’ 22nd congressional district with nearly 32 percent of the vote.
He will now have to face fellow Democrat Letitia Plummer in the May 22 runoff to earn the right to take on the incumbent GOP Rep. Pete Olson.
According to Texas election law, if a candidate doesn’t get more than 50 percent of the votes, there will be a runoff between the top two finishers.
With all the 129 precincts reporting, Kulkarni received 9,466 votes, while Plummer got 7,230 votes (24.3 percent). Mark Gibson, the Democratic nominee in 2016, finished last in a field of five, with 3,046 votes (10.2 percent). The other two candidates in the race, Steve Brown and Margarita Johnson, received 6,246 (21 percent) and 3,767 (12.7 percent) votes, respectively.
Olson, who has been representing the district since 2009, was the winner of the Republican primary, trouncing his nearest rival by nearly 65 percentage points.
Kulkarni, a former US diplomat who served in Iraq and Russia, among other places, had expressed cautious optimism ahead of the primaries.
But his acknowledgement, two weeks before the election, that he was arrested at the age of 18, in 1997, for possessing less than a gram of cocaine may have denied Kulkarni outright victory on March 6th night.
The charges were dropped after a two-year probation — which is usual for first-time drug offenders.
Acknowledging the incident, the candidate said it was due to youthful indiscretion and he did it at a time when his father was terminally ill and he was going to through a difficult time.
“We should not be stigmatizing our youth for the rest of their lives,” Kulkarni said.
His father Venkatesh Kulkarni, a professor and novelist, died in 1998 after battling leukemia for a year. His mother Margaret Preston Kulkarni is from West Virginia.
If elected, the biracial Kulkarni will become the first Indian American congressman from the state of Texas.
He is one of the nearly two-dozen Indian Americans who are running for Congress this year.
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