Rep. Pete Olson, whose margins of victory weren’t narrower than 19 points in four races before 2018, said last month that he wouldn’t seek re-election next year. He won his 2018 race by just under 5 points.

In a strip-mall taqueria in the Houston suburbs, Sri Kulkarni, a 40-year-old former diplomat who lost against Mr. Olson in 2018, brainstormed with Latino activists about how to put his campaign over the top in 2020. He will face a new crop of Democratic primary opponents, including lawyer and local TV news fixture Nyanza Moore and Pearland City Councilman Derrick Reed.

Mr. Kulkarni drew national attention in 2018 for his outreach to members of the district’s large Asian-American communities, including phone banking and canvassing in 16 languages, as well as tapping into community networks to attract unlikely voters. He wants to use a similar strategy with the district’s Latino communities, stressing that Colombians, Mexicans, Venezuelans and other Latino groups shouldn’t be treated as a monolithic bloc.

According to modeling by data-intelligence firm L2 Inc., 77% of these voters in the district in 2018 likely affiliated as Democrats and 12% as Republicans.

“People said, ‘What’s your multilingual outreach gonna do?’” Mr. Kulkarni said of his 2018 race, noting the Asian-American turnout. “Maybe they didn’t vote before because we didn’t bother.”

Rep. Pete Olson, whose margins of victory weren’t narrower than 19 points in four races before 2018, said last month that he wouldn’t seek re-election next year. He won his 2018 race by just under 5 points.

In a strip-mall taqueria in the Houston suburbs, Sri Kulkarni, a 40-year-old former diplomat who lost against Mr. Olson in 2018, brainstormed with Latino activists about how to put his campaign over the top in 2020. He will face a new crop of Democratic primary opponents, including lawyer and local TV news fixture Nyanza Moore and Pearland City Councilman Derrick Reed.

Mr. Kulkarni drew national attention in 2018 for his outreach to members of the district’s large Asian-American communities, including phone banking and canvassing in 16 languages, as well as tapping into community networks to attract unlikely voters. He wants to use a similar strategy with the district’s Latino communities, stressing that Colombians, Mexicans, Venezuelans and other Latino groups shouldn’t be treated as a monolithic bloc.

According to modeling by data-intelligence firm L2 Inc., 77% of these voters in the district in 2018 likely affiliated as Democrats and 12% as Republicans.

“People said, ‘What’s your multilingual outreach gonna do?’” Mr. Kulkarni said of his 2018 race, noting the Asian-American turnout. “Maybe they didn’t vote before because we didn’t bother.”

The Monmouth University poll is the second since the first Democratic presidential primary debate to show him dropping into the single digits in Iowa. At 9 percent, he trails former vice president Joe Biden (28 percent), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (19) and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (11) — albeit within the margin of error against Harris.

Sanders did fare significantly better in a third recent Iowa poll, though, taking 19 percent in a CBS News/YouGov survey a few weeks ago, and his national polling has also been relatively stable after dropping earlier in the summer. Monmouth’s poll also includes a slightly older sample than showed up for the 2016 caucuses, which might depress the numbers of a candidate like Sanders, who does so well with younger voters. So it’s worth waiting to see if more quality Iowa polling shows a similar decline. (It’s also possible Iowa voters are tuning in earlier than other voters, given they hold the first contest, and don’t mirror the nation as a whole.)

But if the new poll is close to accurate, it’s not a great omen. As with the Suffolk University poll a month ago that also put Sanders at 9 percent, this one shows relatively few Iowa voters have him as either their first or second choice. In this poll, another 8 percent name Sanders as their second choice, meaning he’s the first or second choice of just 17 percent of voters. That’s compared to 40 percent for Biden and 38 percent for Warren.

As I argued last month, this is especially ominous for Sanders given he took nearly 50 percent of the vote in the state in 2016. He was never going to get that much of the vote again, given this is a crowded field instead of a two-candidate field, but he’d probably hope to at least be a leading option for lots of voters early in the process. In both this new poll and the Suffolk poll, he’s either tied or trailing South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg on first- and second-choice voters.

Earlier today, a lawsuit was filed alleging that negotiations during a meeting between Empower Texans’ Director Michael Quinn Sullivan with Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen and Republican Caucus Chairman Dustin Burrows violated Texas election laws against campaign activity without proper organization and disclosure by the parties involved. The lawsuit is essential to prevent Sullivan from destroying a voice recording he secretly made during his discussions with Bonnen and Burrows.

Over the last several weeks, Michael Quinn Sullivan has used leaked accounts of a secret recording he made during a private meeting with Bonnen and Burrows in June to publicly pressure and leverage Dennis Bonnen. Sullivan claims that Bonnen asked him to target specific Republican and Democratic State House members for defeat in exchange for granting Empower Texans State House press credentials, which had been denied during the 2019 Legislative Session. Bonnen denies the alleged “quid pro quo” but acknowledges that he defamed and used derogatory terms when discussing several of his House colleagues.

The suit was filed by the Texas Democratic Party and State Representative Ana Maria Ramos (HD104 – Dallas). Both the Party and Representative Ramos have legal standing in the matter.

Texas once again stands accused of violating the U.S. Constitution through its voting laws.

This time the legal challenge comes from the Texas Civil Rights Project on behalf of two Texas voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected after local officials determined the signatures on their ballots were not theirs.

In a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Antonio, those two voters — George Richardson of Brazos County and Rosalie Weisfeld of McAllen — alleged that the state law that allows “untrained local election officials to arbitrarily and subjectively” reject mail-in ballots based on mismatching signatures violates the Fourteenth Amendment, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Joined by groups that represent Texans with disabilities, veterans and young voters, they are asking a federal judge to either block election officials from rejecting mail-in ballots over signature doubts or require Texas to notify voters about an alleged mismatch in time for them to “cure” their ballot.

Texas once again stands accused of violating the U.S. Constitution through its voting laws.

This time the legal challenge comes from the Texas Civil Rights Project on behalf of two Texas voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected after local officials determined the signatures on their ballots were not theirs.

In a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Antonio, those two voters — George Richardson of Brazos County and Rosalie Weisfeld of McAllen — alleged that the state law that allows “untrained local election officials to arbitrarily and subjectively” reject mail-in ballots based on mismatching signatures violates the Fourteenth Amendment, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Joined by groups that represent Texans with disabilities, veterans and young voters, they are asking a federal judge to either block election officials from rejecting mail-in ballots over signature doubts or require Texas to notify voters about an alleged mismatch in time for them to “cure” their ballot.