Sri Preston Kulkarni

On April 4, 2019, Kulkarni announced that he would run for Congress again in the 22nd District of Texas. The Republican incumbent for that office, Pete Olson, will not be running for reelection.

Kulkarni moved to Texas with his family in 1980 and grew up in Houston. His Indian immigrant father, Venkatesh Kulkarni, was a novelist and a professor at Rice University. His white West Virginian mother, Margaret Preston, is a descendant of Sam Houston. He attended Lamar High School, and later the University of Texas and the Harvard Kennedy School.

Srinivas Rao Preston Kulkarni (born October 8, 1978) is a former diplomat and a candidate for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in Texas's 22nd congressional district in 2020. In 2018, he narrowly lost a congressional race in the same district to incumbent Congressman Pete Olson. Kulkarni is a member of the Democratic Party.

Kulkarni placed first in the March 6 Democratic primary with 31.8% of the vote, and won the subsequent May 22 runoff with 61.12% of the votes cast. Because Texas's 22nd congressional district is one of the most diverse in Texas, his campaign took the unorthodox approach of reaching out to infrequent voters in their own neighborhoods and languages, including Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Mandarin. If elected, Kulkarni would have become the first Asian-American ever to serve in the Texas congressional delegation. Despite out-fundraising incumbent Pete Olson, Kulkarni lost the November 6 general election with 46.5% of the vote, in the district's closest race since Olson was first elected.

Kulkarni served in the United States Foreign Service for fourteen years, including in Iraq, Russia, Israel, Taiwan and Jamaica. He also served as a foreign policy and defense adviser to United States Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) on the Senate Armed Services Committee. After President Donald Trump made comments widely seen as supportive of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, Kulkarni resigned from the foreign service and filed to run for Congress in Texas's 22nd congressional district .