Michael Tubbs
Michael Tubbs is currently a special adviser for economic mobility and opportunity for California Governor Gavin Newsom. He was elected in 2012 to the city council in Stockton, California, and in November 2016, at age twenty-six, he won election as that city’s youngest and first-ever African American mayor. In 2020, the year he lost his bid for re-election, Tubbs was the subject of the HBO documentary Stockton on My Mind, which chronicled his political career. He has also been a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics and a member of the MIT Media Lab, and he is founder and chair of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. His autobiography, The Deeper the Roots: A Memoir of Hope and Home, was published by Flatiron Books on November 16, 2021. We spoke by telephone at the end of December.
Q: You grew up in poverty in Stockton, in a single-parent family with your father in prison. In the beginning of the book, you write: “Our circumstances were my normal.” Tell us a bit about that.
Michael Tubbs: Growing up in Stockton, in an economically insecure position, normal things were hearing my mom figure out how she was going to pay the bills every month. Normal things were figuring out where the next meal was going to come from, and oftentimes eating things like beans and rice or government cheese. Normal was me and my mom going to check-cashing places to be able to pay bills. Normal was going to sleep hearing gunshots because we didn’t live in the safest neighborhood.
“America is not a meritocracy. It has some of the lowest rates of upward mobility in the developed world.”
Q: Then you got out of that by going to Stanford University.
Tubbs: Yeah. Going to Stanford was such an amazing eye-opening opportunity because for the first time in my life, I was in a place where all my basic needs were met. There was always going to be food; I didn’t have to even worry about that. It showed me that talent and intellect were universal, but resources and opportunities were not, because my grades were higher at Stanford than they were in high school because I had less to worry about. I had less stress. All I had to do was focus on school.
Q: You recall in the book how you were speaking with friends at graduation, and you said, “Our kids wouldn’t have to struggle the way I had; they would grow up in a world knowing that people like their parents and uncles and aunts went to Stanford.”
Tubbs: It just really showed me how poverty can be broken in one generation and what a blessing my children’s life would be [for them], because it’d be free of the stress and the trauma that I grew up with.
Q: There is a myth in America that any child can grow up to be President, but in fact, circumstances often mitigate against that.
Tubbs: My work now is really to challenge that false narrative. America is not a meritocracy. It has some of the lowest rates of upward mobility in the developed world. In America, your income and zip code determine so much of your outcomes. I was lucky enough to make it out, but we have to really challenge notions of exceptionalism and focus on structures and policy. That’s what my work as mayor was about, and my work as a council member. And that’s what the work I do now is about.
Q: You decided to go back to Stockton and run for city council during your senior year in college. Talk about that campaign.
Tubbs: In Stockton, at the time, you had to run both citywide and in your council district. I was knocking on doors throughout the city and was able to build a base of support beyond my district, which really did provide the springboard to run for mayor. When I was running for city council, I [had] never even worked on a campaign before, so it was all new to me. I learned so much from that campaign about people, about policies, and those lessons I still reflect on now. I was able to build a broad base of support from folks throughout the city, many of whom with different political beliefs because it was relational, it was about what’s ahead of us, it was about really speaking to values and getting other people on board.
Q: What lessons do your campaigns in Stockton offer to other progressive candidates around the country?
Tubbs: Progress comes at a price, so you’ve got to expect backlash. I won my first two elections with 60 percent of the vote and 72 percent of the vote and then lost re-election. Particularly for folks who are challenging the status quo, you have to explain to constituents what you’re doing, because change is scary. And in this crazy world we live in, people use this information on social media to really target people who are effective at making government work for people. I wasn’t prepared for the backlash and how everyone wasn’t happy that we were giving basic income, everybody wasn’t happy we were giving scholarships. I always tell people that winning is the first part, but make sure you stay in.
“I wasn’t prepared for the backlash how everyone wasn’t happy that we were giving basic income, everybody wasn’t happy we were giving scholarships.”
Q: Let’s talk about your guaranteed basic income program. When you became mayor, the first thing you did was set up a group to study poverty, which you saw as your constituents’ biggest problem. Tell us about that process and where it led you.
Tubbs: I was obsessed, remain obsessed, and will probably always be obsessed with poverty. I told my team: “Listen, as mayor, there’s a lot we can do, but our biggest legacy would be around this poverty issue, so could you research ways that the government can end poverty?” They came back with a basic income plan.
Q: This is something actively used in other countries, but it also had been raised in this country by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and later supported by Richard Nixon.
Tubbs: That’s where I got it from, studying Dr. King in college. I was familiar with the idea. In terms of how we did basic income in Stockton, it was really in the civil rights tradition.
Q: You were also surprised to learn that a politician like Richard Nixon would support it as well.
Tubbs: Yes. That’s what makes it interesting. People have different reasons for supporting it. There was a moment in the 1960s when guaranteed income was in vogue and even leading Republicans were talking about a guaranteed income as a way to create more opportunities.
Michael Tubbs’s autobiography, "The Deeper the Roots: A Memoir of Hope and Home"
Q: You talk about it as a tool for solving economic insecurity. How was this program structured in Stockton and what were the kinds of things that it addressed?
Tubbs: We found areas in the city at or below the median income level and randomly selected 125 individuals to each receive $500 a month. We didn’t have any preconditions on this spending and this was before [federal COVID] stimulus checks, before [the presidential campaign of] Andrew Yang. We were the first to do it in the modern era. And then we just checked how the money was spent. We did this for two years, in 2019 and then again in 2020, during the pandemic.
Q: You chose your participants by zip code and didn’t do the traditional method of “means testing” for giving out this money.
Tubbs: We wanted as many people as possible to be eligible so that we would have different types of stories to share about how basic income benefits everyone.
Q: How do you respond to the people who say “You’re giving this to people who don’t need it, isn’t that unfair?” and “You’re giving it to people who are going to waste it on frivolous things or drugs or whatever”?
Tubbs: That’s why it was important for us to collect the data and really illustrate that people are people, and people spend money the way you and I spend money and that we can trust people to make the right decisions. That’s why we are very adamant about having people track their spending every month, and having an independent outside evaluator do the evaluation because we wanted to challenge those negative and false ideas about how people spend money.
Our independent evaluators ran [the research] from the University of Pennsylvania. The website, stocktondemonstration.org, has the research plan [available for everyone to read]. We found that, number one, people spent money, just like we saw with the stimulus checks, on necessities. We found, number two, that a little bit of cash allowed people to transition from part-time to full-time employment two times more likely than others. And then, number three, we saw that it had an impact on mental health.
Q: What are some examples that you got from people of how they used that money?
Tubbs: There are so many. We have Toma, who went from part-time to full-time employment. We have Donna, who didn’t know if she had COVID or not, and the $500 allowed her to stay home so that she wouldn’t infect other people. We have stories of people who were able to start businesses, people who were able to spend more time with their kids, people who paid off credit card debt, and so on.
Q: Now that you are no longer the mayor and this project has run its course, how is this model being extrapolated to other communities and other projects?
Tubbs: I started a group called Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, and we now have sixty-three mayors across this country who have signed up, about twenty-four pilots. Mayors from Los Angeles to Ithaca, New York, are all doing their own versions of basic income. We’re also doing advocacy at the federal level to make sure that we don’t have to do pilots forever, that we can get to a policy.
Q: In the book, you talk about speaking with somebody and saying, “What’s your response to the people who say that, after this is done, we’re just setting people up for failure?”
Tubbs: And he said, “Our back is against the wall, so we can’t fail.” Which is something I have really taken to heart, that for folks who are struggling with economic insecurity, who live in poverty, failure is not an option for them because they’re already at ground zero in terms of economic failure through no fault of their own. That remains my North Star of inspiration.