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The Plot to Take Down Michael Tubbs
The young Black mayor of Stockton, California, was a progressive superstar. Then a feisty local blog decided he had to go.
The plot against Michael Tubbs, the first Black mayor of Stockton, California, and the youngest person ever to run a major U.S. city, was conceived even before he took the oath of office, at the age of 26, on January 9, 2017.
The mayorship was not a job for the faint of heart. The former incumbent, Anthony Silva, whose antics included donning medieval-style armor during a state of the city address and giving God a key to the city, had left office under a cloud — accused of everything from financial improprieties to hosting a teenage strip poker game. Meanwhile, the city once dubbed America’s “most miserable” had struggled to emerge from the devastating blow of the 2008 financial crisis and by 2013 had become the biggest U.S. municipality to declare bankruptcy. Poverty, food insecurity, illiteracy, homelessness, and other societal ills seemed intractable. Due in part to geography — Stockton is a convenient way station for Bay Area–bound narcotics traffic — the city clocked a homicide rate nearly triple the national average.
The city’s governing structure would complicate the challenge even further: Stockton has a “weak mayor” system, under which the mayor has little authority beyond that of the other city council members. Even with the mandate provided by Tubbs’ 70% landslide, his new office afforded little real power. Whatever wins he’d manage to notch would derive from his personal charisma, his outside connections, and his ability to line up the rest of the council behind his vision.
Nevertheless, over the next four years, Michael Tubbs would become a genuine Democratic superstar, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, and the subject of a feature-length HBO documentary. He would spearhead a $20 million scholarship fund, bankrolled by his Stanford pal, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, and create a nationally recognized universal basic income program to provide $500 per month to some of the city’s poorest residents, fully funded by outside philanthropy.
