Friends and family, I am honored to tell you that I’m running for Lieutenant Governor of California. And in a moment, I’ll ask you to officially join our campaign. But first, please allow me a chance to tell you about what brings me to this decision.
I was born and raised on the south side of Stockton to a single mother still in high school. My father has been incarcerated my entire life. So you could say that I wasn’t set up for success because we didn’t grow up with money. But that misses what we did have in abundance: the unshakeable love of family, commitment to bettering our community, and our faith. My three moms — my mom, aunt and grandmother — were not going to let me become a statistic. They helped pave the path for me to go from poverty in South Stockton to the classrooms at Stanford University.
While my life seemed to be heading in a certain direction, things were very different for folks back home just an hour and a half away. In my junior year at school (literally, while I was interning at the White House), my cousin was tragically shot and killed at a Halloween party. Stockton became one of the hardest-hit cities in the Great Recession.
I had to make a choice about what to do with my pain. Stanford opened up opportunities I never knew existed. But as graduation approached, Stockton was pulling me back. My purpose was in service. I ran for city council instead after graduation, a move that many people scoffed at since I was just 21 at the time. We created the city’s first Office of Violence Prevention.
In 2016, I was elected as Stockton’s youngest ever and first Black mayor. We launched the first local guaranteed income program in the nation and created a one-of-a-kind scholarship fund to give every student in our city a path to college or trade school.
We brought together community members, activists and abuelas from the neighborhood to launch the Stockton Green New Deal.
And importantly, I partnered with the police chief to reduce homicides and shootings by 40%.
Since I left office, I founded Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (MGI), a coalition of mayors across the country advocating for a guaranteed income to ensure that all Americans have the opportunity to improve their lives. Since our launch, we’ve worked with 150 mayors in piloting and advocating for guaranteed income programs in their communities.
Building on our work with MGI, I helped to create End Poverty in California (EPIC) because a state with as much resources and creativity as California should not have the highest poverty rate in the country. I’ve traveled to communities across California to hear the stories and ideas of people living in poverty and help to educate the public and inform those in positions of power.
I’m running for Lt. Governor because I believe California will become a beacon of hope and a shining example, if we work together to tackle the big challenges before us:
Join me in choosing action over apathy. See this campaign not as mine, but as ours. Together, we're going to write California's next chapter.
This campaign is going to be fun. It’s going to be energizing. And I’m psyched to have you all be part of it alongside me, my wife Anna, and our kids.
We know nationally that reactionary politicians are using hostility and negativity to distract from the real challenges holding us back. I’m not naive to the difficulty of breaking through cynicism. But I also know that we don’t have any other choice.
This is the time to do something different. To fight for something more than the politics of division that has slowed our progress for far too long.
We are going to run a campaign not about looking backward and assigning blame, but about building energy and excitement for the future we can build together. I can’t wait to get started, and I can’t wait to hear from you all in this process.
The first step of that process is gathering support by recruiting as many Founding Donors as we can to help us spread the good word. So, please, become a Founding Donor right now on our launch day to join this movement. It would mean a lot to me.
Before I sign off, allow me to thank you from the bottom of my heart…whether you can donate or not. Thank you for allowing me to introduce myself and talk about why we’re running this race. Thank you for believing in me, yourself and California. Thank you for being civically engaged even as others lose hope.
You inspire me. And we will do great things for California together.
With love and gratitude,
Michael Tubbs
Candidate for Lt. Governor
