Congressional District 9 candidates Josh Harder, Tom Patti meet for forum at Record

On Thursday, Oct. 13, The Stockton Record hosted a Candidates Forum with Josh Harder and Tom Patti, competing to represent San Joaquin County in Congress.

Jerry McNerney has represented most of the county since 2013, but the 71-year-old Democrat elected not to seek a sixth term. Harder has represented a portion of the county, not in McNerney’s district. And Patti has served as a San Joaquin County supervisor since 2016.

More: Up close and personal: Fact checking Josh Harder and Tom Patti

We partnered with The Modesto Bee in organizing this forum since a portion of this district is in their coverage area.

Our aim was to have an interactive, moderated discussion to provide viewers with an opportunity to hear from both Harder and Patti.

And from our understanding, this was the only venue in which the two men were to appear together to exchange views.

Also present were the respective Community Advisory Councils for each newspaper, three members for The Record and three for the Bee. Each person was there to observe and later discuss the forum.

With representatives for both Patti and Harder and newspaper staff, we had about 14 people in the room.

We had originally scheduled a full hour for the discussion, but that was shortened to about 40 minutes when Patti arrived about 20 minutes after the scheduled start time, which he attributed to a scheduling error. And we had a hard stop time at the top of the hour because Harder had another appointment.

The format: two-minute opening statement, 90 seconds to reply to questions, no direct questioning of each other, direction from moderators as to who fielded questions and rebuttals, and then two-minute closing statements.

And with that, we jumped right into the questions, and it did not take long before things got heated and personal.

As is often seen in politics, there was lots of hair-splitting, parsing, and misdirection.

Patti focused on labeling Harder, who moved to Tracy from Turlock for this district, a carpetbagger. Meanwhile, Harder echoed a previous comment campaign point of Patti voting to raise gas taxes and prescription drug prices.

Within about an hour of completion, both Harder and Patti’s campaigns had sent in their fact check of their opponent’s comments.

We also did our own fact-check, and you can see our story for that information.

Overall, it was lively and interesting, and I would gladly do it again.

Contact Executive Editor Donald W. Blount at dblount@recordnet.com or on Twitter @donblount. Support local news, subscribe to The Stockton Record at https://www.recordnet.com/subscribenow.

This article originally appeared on The Record: Election 2022: Congressional District 9 candidates Harder, Patti debate