209 Times’s Impact on the Stockton Mayoral Race

The Stockton Mayoral Election has been a major subject of interest for the past few weeks not only in the local news, but in the mainstream news as well, with big name networks such as NPR News and LA Times publishing pieces on this situation. With current Stockton mayor, Michael Tubbs, trailing behind upstart politician, Kevin Lincoln, by 11,547 votes as of the writing of this article, it seems highly, highly unlikely that Michael Tubbs will win reelection, especially since there are only 7,550 ballots left to be counted, according to the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters’s latest report. At this point, it’s safe to say that Kevin Lincoln is the mayor elect of Stockton.

[Michael Tubbs on the left, Kevin Lincoln on the right]

The continuing election results have commonly shocked those outside of Stockton, because how can a candidate that was both endorsed by (now former) President Obama and Oprah Winfrey back in the city’s 2016 mayoral race and achieved national fame to the point where he was offered his own HBO documentary lose to the new, relatively unknown Kevin Lincoln?

Many point to the popular blog, 209 Times, as the main cause behind this situation.

With Stockton’s local newspaper, the Record, suffering staff cuts over the past few years, 209 Times has become increasingly more prominent on social media, accumulating over 119,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 100,000 followers on Facebook. While they post about various news, they are widely known for their bias against Mayor Tubbs. With the large influence they exercise, both media outlets and individual citizens blamed the misinformation spread by 209 Times for Mayor Tubbs’s poor performance in the 2020 Stockton Election.

According to Michael Fitzgerald, a former writer for the Stockton Record, Tubbs was “ . . . wounded by the 209 Times . . . [They] just created this false narrative about Tubbs, and they just kept pounding that narrative.” Tubbs’s spokesman, Daniel Lopez, bluntly stated that the 209 Times’s publications about Tubbs were “outright lies,” going on to say, “209 Times is a perfect example of what you are seeing in the country. It’s ‘pick your own news.’”

In response to the public attention, Motecuzoma Sanchez, the founder of 209 Times, expressed in the LA Times, “We are not asking their side of it. We are telling you what we know. We never tried to hide our bias.” . . . And this statement does hold true. 209 Times is proud of their dislike towards Mayor Tubbs, often calling him “a failed incumbent and absent mayor,” that can only respond in “arrogance” to Kevin Lincoln giving him a “Stockton slap” in the mayoral race. Over the years, they’ve mocked Tubbs and his workers by calling them, “Mayor Tubbs and his corrupt crew,” and frequently insulated that Tubbs’ Advance Peace program was simply just a “Cash For Criminals program.”

Sanchez further elaborates on his comments made in the LA Times article later on their Instagram platform by stating, “Our team [is] the only [one] in the nation exposing the truth about Tubbs with documentation, photos, and actual videos. Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to follow pre-fabricated narratives that Tubbs himself gave them.”

Lopez passionately disagrees with these statements, however. “To address our challenges we need an informed public. How can we have a dialogue around homelessness, for example, when the 209 Times persuades residents that we’ve been given $60 million for this issue, when in reality we only have $6.5 million? I’m sure a good number of Stocktonians reading this article will learn for the first time that the $60-million number is fake, yet some will still believe regardless.”

However, while 209 Times did play a major role in Tubbs’ failure to win reelection, it’s important to remember that it wasn’t the only cause, as some Stockton residents have already been unsatisfied with Tubbs’s performance as a mayor to begin with before 209 Times’s rise on social media. Critics often point out that nothing—at least, in terms of crime rate—has changed under Mayor Tubbs. When analyzing the 2017, 2018, and 2019 Stockton PD crime reports, crime rates have remained relatively the same, only increasing or decreasing by 0.1 YTD percent over the years. Furthermore, Tubbs’s endorsement of Micheal Bloomberg (a man who received continuous negative public reception for his decision to run) for the democratic presidential candidate position undoubtedly harmed his reputation as a supposed “man of the people.”

While Mayor Tubbs has seen notably successful results with his universal income program, SEED (Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration), his achievements are often overshadowed by his failures, and 209 Times only built upon that stirring discontent.