Gerald Mark McNerney (/məkˈnɜːrni/ mək-NUR-nee; born June 18, 1951) is an American businessman and politician who has served a member of the California State Senate since 2024.

[3] On December 8, 2023, McNerney filed for an open seat in District 5 of the California State Senate, upending a move into the race by Assemblymember Carlos Villapudua.

After leaving West Point in 1971 in protest of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War,[7] he enrolled at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees and, in 1981, a Ph.D. in mathematics, with a doctoral dissertation in differential geometry focusing on a generalization of the Laplace–Beltrami operator.

In 1994, he began working as an energy consultant for PG&E, FloWind, The Electric Power Research Institute, and other utility companies.

In June 2006 he won the Democratic primary with 52.8% of the vote, defeating Steve Filson, who had been endorsed by the DCCC, and Stevan Thomas.

The report noted "a [GOP] party spokesman says it's because they want to win decisively but others speculate that internal polling has delivered bad news for the incumbent.

[19] In 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law a bill McNerney wrote that establishes an evaluation panel to assess the Veteran's Administration treatments for traumatic brain injury.

[23][24] In 2007, McNerney voted against legislation that would have prevented the DEA from enforcing prohibition in the 12 states (including California) that allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

[26] In April 2018, McNerney, Jared Huffman, Jamie Raskin, and Dan Kildee launched the Congressional Freethought Caucus.

[27] McNerney voted with President Joe Biden's stated position 100% of the time in the 117th Congress, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis.

[28] After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, McNerney called it "a partisan body that is no longer a legitimate arbiter of our Constitution."