Jerry McNerney acknowledges the race for the California Senate District 5 seat is much closer than he originally anticipated. But the former Democratic congressman is still confident he will be going to Sacramento.
As of late Thursday, McNerney leads Shoemaker by 591 votes with more than 182,000 votes counted. The McNerney and Shoemaker campaigns estimate there are approximately 100,000 ballots left to count.
The current senator, Susan Talamantes Eggman, a Democrat who terms out at the end of the year, won by almost 10 percentage points four years ago, while Democrat Cathleen Galgiani won by more than 13 points in 2016.
The next vote count will be announced by 7 p.m. Friday, according to the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters’ office.
“(The results) are a little closer than we were hoping, but we’re confident that it is going to trend more strongly in my direction as new vote tallies come out,” McNerney said. “Historically, the votes that come in later tend to be more Democratic. And moreover, we’ve only counted about 30% of the votes in Alameda County, and we’ll do pretty strongly there.”
Shoemaker, a businessman from Clements currently leading the vote in San Joaquin County, is not lacking in confidence either.
“I think when they drop the numbers (on Friday), we will go up substantially and we will go ahead of Jerry,” Shoemaker said.
Both agree that Donald Trump’s successful bid to regain the U.S. presidency likely affected local races. Shoemaker, who stated he is a Trump supporter, said, “In the bigger picture, it definitely helped.”
“People saw a lot of Trump, and he encouraged a lot of Republicans to come out and vote,” McNerney said. “Whereas, I think on the Democratic side, a lot of people sat at home; they didn’t make the vote.”
McNerney, a longtime politician who served in Congress from 2007 to 2023, is trying to hold off the upset bid of Shoemaker, a San Joaquin County businessman with dealings in the building, construction and pool maintenance industries.
Shoemaker was the lone Republican to run for the seat in the March primary. McNerney, who was lured out of political retirement to run against Assemblymember Carlos Villapudua, split the primary’s Democratic vote with the current state representative.
Villapudua had initially registered to run for reelection in the 13th Assembly District but switched places with his wife, Edith Villapudua. She’d originally registered to run for state Senate District 5 just before the December candidate filing deadline.