Michael Tubbs used a candidate questionnaire to make his opening case to California voters for lieutenant governor, casting himself as a statewide contender who can bring a city hall record into a job usually defined by Sacramento seniority. The Stockton Democrat said he would use every lever available to lower costs and push structural changes that make California more affordable.
The timing matters because the questionnaire arrived before the June primary, when voters are still sorting through a field that includes three Republicans and three Democrats. Tubbs, born Aug. 2, 1990, lives in Los Angeles now, but he is leaning hard on the years he spent as Stockton’s mayor and a city councilmember to argue that he has already done the work of governing under pressure.
In his answers, Tubbs said he is the only lieutenant governor candidate who served as an executive during President Donald Trump’s first term. He said he fought Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration while running Stockton, a city where he says his team launched the first guaranteed basic income program in U.S. history and cut homicides by 40%. Tubbs also said the city became the second-most fiscally sound in California under his watch.
He is trying to turn those local achievements into a statewide credential. Tubbs said he raised more than $20 million to create Stockton Scholars, a scholarship and mentorship program for students, and he said his background as a nonprofit founder and director fits the same pattern: build something practical, then scale it.
That argument runs into the campaign’s central fault line. Tubbs presents himself as a newer kind of leader, but he also acknowledges that his main competitors have spent many years in Sacramento. He does not dismiss that experience outright; instead, he tries to make it sound like a different kind of résumé, arguing that the lieutenant governor’s office needs someone who has worked inside a city government and not just around the state Capitol.
Tubbs also used the questionnaire to sketch what he would do with the office. He said he would back Eleni Kounalakis’ opposition to tuition increases at the University of California, California State University and community colleges. He said the lieutenant governor should help unlock public land for public good, explore land leasing as a revenue stream for public higher education, and support workforce housing for faculty and staff through revenue-sharing leases that would monetize assets without privatizing them. A portion of those lease payments, he said, could flow back into student aid.
For Tubbs, the pitch is less about ceremony than leverage. He is asking voters to see the lieutenant governor’s office as a place to press affordability, housing and higher education in ways that can reach beyond speeches. The question now is whether enough primary voters will reward a Stockton record and a promise of new machinery over the longer Sacramento resumes his rivals bring to the race.
