Ditch the smartphones.

Watch only commercial free streaming.

We are about to come under attack.

It will be relentless like the London Blitz of World War II.

Lies emblazoned across mailers will fill your recycling carts

And it’ll be as headache inducing as a backstreet rave in San Francisco.

It’s because the party animals are targeting San Joaquin County.

More precisely, it’s the 9th Congressional District.

Between now and March 5, 2024  the party animals will be descending on District 9 voters like locust that have found a virgin field of wheat.

The reason is simple.

Both sides smell blood in the water.

And it’s all because Stockton Mayor Kevin Lincoln is challenging incumbent Josh Harder.

The 9th is arguably one of the few districts in California — as well as in the nation — that is more moderate and centralist than it is blue or red.

Party line voting isn’t a forgone conclusion.

It is overrun with successful honest-to-goodness small family farmers.

Neighborhoods are home to truck drivers, Livermore Lab workers, tech commuters, and tons of others that can afford $700,000 plus homes.

And those neighborhoods are in the same cities where farm workers, laborers, and people supporting families on multiple jobs just above the minimum wage reside as well.

This is where families impoverished in Mexico come to work the fields seeking a better life for their children who have become world-renown brain surgeons and NASA astronauts.

This is where middle class families often dependent on six-figure tech industry checks squeezed by the high cost of living in the Bay Area move to afford a decent house and to raise their kids.

The 9th District as reapportioned in 2020 is the quintessential cultural, socio-economic and political blender in California.

For whatever reason, the Republican National Party barely sent a dime Tom Patti’s way when the county supervisor representing parts of Stockton, Lathrop and  the segment Manteca north of Yosemite Avenue ran against Harder in 2022.

So what makes 2024 different than 2022?

The short answer: The 2020 Stockton mayoral election.
Lincoln, a Republican, in 2020 ousted Michel Tubbs, a Democrat.

Tubbs wasn’t — and isn’t — just any Democrat.

Born impoverished in South Stockton, he graduated from Stanford University on a needs-based scholarship.

An essay Tubbs penned about overcoming the mistakes his parents made  that was published in the San Francisco Chronicle  criticized his father's "scapegoat mentality" and praised his mother for overcoming adversity.

He was elected to the Stockton City Council as a 22-year-old. Three years later, he became one of the youngest mayors in the United States.

Oprah Winfrey was among the power elite  backing him. Tubbs was a rising star in the progressive wing of the California Democratic Party.

Tubb’s defeat was as an unexpected body slam takedown of Tubbs who some were viewing as a future US Senator or even governor.

He was beaten by Lincoln who was also born and raised in Stockton.

Lincoln joined the Marines in 2002. At one point, he was assigned to Marine One, the helicopter that carries the president, during George W. Bush’s administration.

After serving in the Marines, Lincoln worked for a private security firm in the Silicon Valley before returning to Stockton to become a church’s executive pastor.

Harder is a fifth generation Northern San Joaquín Valley resident who resides with his wife and daughter in Tracy.

His grandfather started it all when he came to Manteca during the Gold Rush and started a peach farm.

Harder was born in Turlock. graduated from Modesto High, and then Stanford University. He was a vice president for a venture capitalist firm before moving back to Turlock, teaching business at Modesto Junior College, and running successfully for Congress in 2018.

 Now that the background is out of the way, let’s look at the landscape that counts — San Joaquin County.

The 9th District includes all of San Joaquin County except Lathrop as well as the rural area south of Manteca, east of Tracy, and west of Ripon. The 9th also contains slivers of Stanislaus and Contra Costa counties.

There is an assumption that Stockton is the proverbial 900-pound gorilla in this campaign.

That’s based on it having 312,000 of the district’s 760,000 or so residents.

But there a little detail that numbers don’t reflect.

Few residing in Tracy, Manteca, Mountain House, Ripon, and Escalon with a combined population 240,000 strong have even minimal connections to Stockton and vice versa.

Toss in Lodi, and suddenly there is 300,000 people that aren’t hardwired into Stockton politics by any stretch of the imagination

Typically, a city Stockton’s size would be the “place” to gravitate toward for nearby smaller cities.

 The gravitational pull is the Bay Area.

Plus Mountain House, Tracy, and Manteca along with Lathrop — that is not in the district — are perennially among the top 10 fastest growing communities in California.

And this is not “white flight” from the Bay Area.

It is a rich cross-section of people of all ethnicities and cultures.

Lincoln may be a household name in Stockton, but in the land of the nation’s fastest growing population of super commuters, he barely rings a bell.

That, of course, is what campaigns are all about — getting voters to know you.

Party animals that bleed red are likely salivating over the fact Gov. Newsom lost San Joaquin County in 2022, the same county Harder won.

But here’s the winkle.

Patti clearly ran as the anti-Newsom, Harder didn’t.

Harder, instead, ran in the middle.

The classic mistake for the Republicans to assume is that San Joaquin County is all about Democrats versus Republicans or conservatives versus liberals.

At the same time political action committees aligned with Democratic Party interests might want to tread lightly and resist using attacks that besmirch Lincoln’s uprising, military service and faith.

And while everyone is at it, don’t overlook the impact Brett Dood — the Ripon resident and lead pastor of the Calvary Reformed Church — could have on the race especially if party animals on both sides of the aisle “PAC” a lot of mischief in “unauthorized campaigning” on behalf of candidates.

Dood at the least could force a November 2024 runoff.

It’s almost a forgone conclusion that the congressional race will be nasty, although there is no reason to sling cultural war mud to see the clear differences between Lincoln and Harder.

Who knows, in San Joaquin County where those diametrically opposed on issues don’t make it a routine habit of trying not to communicate, perhaps the Great American campaign smear machine will backfire on whatever side gins it up the most.

People, after all, who gravitate toward the middle and tends to seek common ground aren’t wild about about  scorched earth politics.

One last thing.

All politics are local.

And nowhere is that truer than in the House of Representatives.

Clearly social-cultural issues plus spending and tax policies of both parties fall in to that bailiwick.

But so do truly local issues that the federal government has a huge say in.

That is extremely true when it comes to the federal blessing needed for Newsom’s Delta Tunnel to proceed.

Water — or more precisely what Congress could do to protect San Joaquín County from being ravaged for the benefit of corporate billionaire Westlands  farming on marginal land and powering SoCal growth — is key when  it comes to the Delta Tunnel.

The loss of  vast tracts of prime farmland, the devastation of environment, the loss of jobs, and the tightening and increased salt intrusion of local water supplies would be earthshattering if the Delta Tunnel is built.

The last thing San Joaquin County needs is a member of Congress more worried about cultural wars than the survivability of the people they represent.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com