Michael Tubbs losing his Stockton mayoral reelection bid didn’t make anyone’s 2020 top 10 tragedies list. The year was far too brutal for a political wunderkind’s early career hiccup to register as anything more than a pause. Tubbs, 30, became the youngest mayor in the country of a city with more than 100,000 residents (Stockton has around 313,000) when he was elected in 2016, the same night Donald Trump won the presidency. Tubbs remembers it well, “I was thinking, ‘Wow, Stockton got it right.’” Tubbs instituted some of the most progressive and innovative civic initiatives in the country, recasting Stockton as a community that took pride in a new problem-solving sensibility.