While in an interview with the Daily Trojan former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs’ middle child, Nehemiah Tubbs, three years old, sat on his lap with a smile, trying to interact with the talking heads she saw on screen. After tapping the computer screen multiple times, Nehemiah answered the question ‘What is your name?’ but not before calling herself Michael, her father and hero. 

Family has always been important to Tubbs — a Spring 2024 Fellow at the Dornsife College of Letters and Sciences Center for the Political Future — after growing up with a single, teen mother, due to his father, also Michael Tubbs, being in prison. Tubbs was raised by his mother, Racole Dixon, — who had Tubbs when she was 16 — his aunt, Tasha Dixon and his grandmother Barbara Nicholson.

“I would not be who I am, or be able to do anything I do without my family,” Tubbs said. “They really create a level of urgency for me in terms of, what type of state do I want my kids to grow up in? What type of society do I want my daughter, my two sons, to grow up in?”

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Behind Tubbs and his energetic daughter, in the background of the Zoom call, was a collage of Stockton landmarks, where Tubbs was born, raised and became a father. Upon being elected mayor of the city, he also became both the first Black mayor in the city’s history and the youngest mayor of any major city in American history. 

“Growing up the way I grew up illustrated to me that talent and intellect can be found anywhere, but resource opportunities are not,” Tubbs said. “That is why I am so passionate about government because I know that many of the people I grew up with in Stockton are just as smart, or smarter [than] many of the people I went to Stanford with, and the big difference wasn’t how hard they worked, necessarily, but the environments in which they were placed in.”

Also featured in the collage was Stanford University’s logo, where Tubbs, the first in his family to graduate from college, earned his bachelor’s degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and master’s degree in policy, organization and leadership studies. 

“Oftentimes people use their experiences as a moat, like, ‘Only my experiences matter,’ but for me, they are a bridge to other experiences and other circumstances,” Tubbs said. 

Now, Tubbs is looking to leave Stockton again. This time, he dreams of Sacramento as he runs for Lieutenant Governor in 2026 — which might not have been a reality if it was not for his time at USC in the Spring.

Coming off a failed 2020 reelection bid in Stockton, Tubbs turned to USC —  the same place he spent his high school summers while participating in the California Youth Think Tank program — to lead a study group focused on mayorship in the 21st Century. 

“[After] spending 12 weeks talking about politics and how to change things with my fellowship group, it became bigger than me,” Tubbs said. “By the time the fellowship was over, I was like, ‘Hey, I think I still have some fire, I think I might want to run for something again.’”

That perseverance and openness about the loss is one of the things Md Zuhayeer Iqbal, a sophomore majoring in political science as well as philosophy who was one of the students in Tubbs’ class, admired most about him.

“Many people, after losing an election, would give up and they would not run for higher office,” Iqbal said. “But he shows that a minor loss, a minor roadblock, isn’t enough to stop him.”

Tubbs said he was also inspired to run because of his time serving as the special advisor for Gov.Gavin Newsom for Economic Mobility and Opportunity, where he created End Poverty in California, which has raised more than a billion dollars for childhood savings account programs.

“My frustration was, in doing that work and getting the legislation passed, going to local communities and seeing it had not trickled down to them,” Tubbs said.

Tubbs called the Lieutenant Governor the “caretaker of the future” and said that, if elected, he wants to bring the same energy to the state capital that turned Stockton from a bankrupt city when he began on the city council at age 21 in 2011, to the second most fiscally healthy city in the United States by the time he left the mayoral office.

“Part of the frustration we have [with] Sacramento is that a lot of the people making the decisions have been there for a really long time and have not really experienced what it’s like to be a normal citizen,” Tubbs said. “There should be younger people who are part of positioning California to remain golden in the future.”

Tubbs wants to focus on the affordability crisis and implementing initiatives like universal basic income — popularized by Andrew Yang’s 2020 Presidential Campaign — which was first executed by Tubbs in Stockton.

“His political advertising is really trying to target middle-class voters, who are talking about how difficult it is to achieve the dream,” said Kamy Akhavan, the executive director for the Dornsife Center for the Political Future.

Despite saying that economic issues, like the affordability crisis, are the most important to California voters and that Tubbs’ name is likely one of the largest in the race, Akhavan said the former mayor of Stockton has a tough road to election. While it is not uncommon for those defeated in mayoral campaigns to run in Sacramento, he said it is uncommon for them to win, but not impossible. 

Akhavan said running on economic policy before the primary could lower Tubbs’ odds of gaining the nomination but earning key endorsements, specifically Gov. Newsom’s, will be critical to the Tubbs campaign.

A major part of Tubbs’ class at USC was high-profile guest speakers, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and 2005-2013 Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Another was his ability to work with, connect and inspire his students.

“As a Black student who is going into politics, being able to talk to someone who is very young, who knows a lot about the space and who has a similar background to me, that was just very worthwhile for me,” said John Kersh, a sophomore majoring in philosophy, politics and law who was a member of Tubbs’ class. “It gave me a mirror to see what I could potentially be doing.”

Iqbal, Kersh’s friend who suggested Tubbs’ course to him, felt a similar connection to Tubbs.

“[Tubbs taught me that] you do not have to wait to get that right internship, you do not have to wait to get the right opportunity, start somewhere and make your impact,” Iqbal said.