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Candidate Forum with Balat vs. Kulkarni – 休斯敦华裔联盟
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Candidate Forum with Balat vs. Kulkarni

Candidate Forums

February 24, 2018: HCA hosted a candidate forum with David Balat, Republican candidate for Texas’s 2nd Congressional District, and Sri Preston Kulkarni, Democratic candidate for Texas’s 22nd congressional district.

The on-going early voting of 2018 midterm election was at the center of media focus. One week before the end of early voting, on Feb 24th afternoon, Houston Chinese Alliance (HCA) invited the Republican candidate David Balat and Democrat candidate Sri Preston Kulkarni to meet voters in a friendly forum. This well-attended event has attracted much interest from Houston Chinese community.

In the forum, both candidates presented their fundamental vision for the country as well as their stances on critical issues for Chinese community. They then clarified and discussed the issues at the heart of the Chinese community. Both David Balat and Sri Preston Kulkarni talked about their background and why they were running for the position. They explained their opinions on critical issues such as educations, immigrations, global climate change, rebuilding after Harvey and gun control. Despite the wide range of topics, the focus was on:

  1. About Affirmative Action (AA). The two candidates held drastically different opinion. While Sri believe that AA is necessary to protect some specific demographic groups, David believed that the necessity of AA has outdated and opposed AA for the sake of encouraging personal efforts.
  2. About disaggregated race/ethnicity data, especially for Asian ethnics group: both candidates oppose the disaggregation data for Asian ethnics only.
  3. About reverse discrimination, both candidates believe that such reverse discrimination of Asians should not happen.
  4. About reconstruction plan after Harvey: since both candidates are Houston local, they both express their sympathy and care for people affect by this severe natural disaster, and urge the government to improve the infrastructure and provide more support.
  5. About Health Insurances: David believes the federal government should not interfere this issue. Health care and health insurance has its local unique challenges and are most effectively handled at the local and regional level. David further told everyone that helping to push for more effective and efficient health care system is one of his main motivations to run for election. Elected or not, he will keep working on this issue.

Check out the video of this forum here