By Jim Saksa, CQ-Roll Call
WILMINGTON, Del. — As she pulls up in front of a downtown coffee shop, Sarah McBride answers a reporter’s question matter-of-factly, all while parallel parking. “I’ve never had a job where I haven’t had death threats,” she says.
That’s the reality for a transgender woman in politics. But before McBride can expound on that, she needs another coffee.
McBride, 34, basically subsists on coffee; it’s the only thing she consumes before dinner most days. Knocking on doors on this sunny Saturday morning, she comes across as bubbly and warm, remembering names and faces. She’s had practice: She spoke at the Democratic National Convention at age 25, published a memoir at 27 and won a state Senate seat at 30.
Now she’s on track to become the first trans member of Congress. She has the endorsement of her state party in the Sept. 10 primary, and things are looking good in November, too. Democrats haven’t lost a congressional race in Delaware since 2008.
For McBride, making history is both crucially important and completely beside the point.
“There are a lot of people right now in this country who don’t see themselves reflected in government, and they deserve to see that,” she says of her gender identity. “But on a day-to-day basis, it’s not what I’m talking about or thinking about. It’s not what voters are talking to me about.”
Delaware voters may not be talking about it, but Republicans across the nation are. Social conservatives have redoubled their opposition to the LGBTQ rights movement in recent years. The GOP has turned gender identity into a wedge issue, campaigning on promises to ban trans women from female sports, to restrict gender-affirming health care and to dictate which public bathrooms they can use.
McBride’s would-be colleagues have introduced 75 anti-trans bills this Congress, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker, and at the state level, 638 anti-trans bills have been introduced, with 45 passing so far in 2024.
Simply living life as an out trans person can subject you to gawking, invasive questions, threats of violence and worse. Running for office as a trans person amplifies all that.
“I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t (run) because of that risk, then they win, right? They achieve their goal of intimidating people into not fully participating in our democracy,” McBride says. “I wasn’t going to let them have that power.”
So, in June 2023, she announced her candidacy for a House seat opened up by Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester’s decision to run for Senate. A mudslide of hateful threats soon followed, McBride says.
In the state Senate that same month, a bill McBride was sponsoring came up for a vote after passing the Delaware House, 27-10. It was aimed at banning what’s known as the LGTBQ “panic” defense, or the idea that a defendant can be justified in attacking gay or trans people out of fear of their sexual or gender identity.
McBride rose warily on the floor to speak in its support. “I paused and I waited for my Republican colleagues to say, ‘this is a solution in search of a problem,’ at best, or worse, that ‘this is understandable, if not justifiable violence,’” she says.
But they didn’t. Instead, she says, “every single present senator on the Republican side stood up and not only declared they’d be voting for the bill, but — led by the most conservative member in that chamber — asked to be added as a co-sponsor.”
They “looked me in the eyes … and affirmed the dignity of LGBTQ lives,” she says.
The power of proximity
A political obsessive since childhood, when other kids were reading Harry Potter, McBride was reading about Harry Truman. For Christmas one year, she asked for a podium, so she could practice giving speeches in front of a mirror. She can pinpoint the exact time and place when she met her personal idol: at a local pizza shop, on Feb. 1, 2002, starstruck at age 11.
It was Joe Biden. She still has the autograph he gave her. Five years later, she was volunteering on his son’s campaign for state attorney general.
Her desire to serve, she says, stems in part from her time as a closeted kid scared that her life would be ruined and her family ashamed if she lived as her authentic self.
“As a young person, struggling with who I am and how I fit into this world, struggling with the fear that the heart of this country was not big enough to love someone like me, I went searching for hope,” she says.
Now she wants to take some of the hope and affirmation she felt last June — and every other time her proposals have gotten bipartisan support in Dover — and bring it to Washington.
“Through the power of our proximity, we can open some of the most closed-off hearts and minds, break through some of the perverse, base incentives in our politics,” she says. “But that only happens if you’re willing to work with people who disagree with you.”
McBride is no Pollyanna; she knows Washington’s most extreme Republicans, like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, aren’t going to warm to her.
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“Look, the reality in politics is you’re never going to convince everyone of everything,” McBride says. “She’ll be particularly weird when it comes to me, but let her inhumanity contrast with my literal humanity and let her unhinged behavior contrast with my approach to the job, which is to roll up my sleeves, dive into the details, bring people together and work on actual policy.”
McBride has already found ways to turn personal attacks on their head. After Greene called her campaign in June a “complete evil” that would “curse” the nation, McBride partnered with Leaders We Deserve, a progressive “Emily’s List for young people,” to put out a fundraising appeal.
And in July, her campaign announced that she raised $750,000 in the second quarter of 2024, “the best financial quarter of fundraising for any U.S. House candidate in Delaware history, incumbent or not.”
A lot of that money comes from out of state — 63% this cycle, according to OpenSecrets. McBride acknowledges that national reach even while repeatedly steering the conversation back to voters in Delaware.
“Are there folks … in Delaware who are excited about shattering a national lavender glass ceiling? Sure,” she says. But “fighting for paid family and medical leave and affordable child care and gun safety and reproductive freedom, that’s where the excitement is.”
‘Every single door’
McBride’s instincts for retail politics are nothing new. As an undergraduate at American University, she “became the first candidate for student body president to knock on every single door in every single residence hall on the main campus,” she wrote in her memoir.
She won that early race handily, prompting a congratulatory call from then-Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, one of her political mentors. And after McBride came out as trans to her parents over winter break, it was a phone call from Markell that helped calm their fears that she’d be shunned by their old friends and neighbors.
As her term ended, McBride came out publicly in an essay in her school newspaper. The post went viral, and national outlets picked up the story. A few months later, she became the first openly trans White House intern.
Back home, she worked with Equality Delaware to push for the state’s first law banning discrimination against transgender people. “She’s probably the most natural and articulate orator I have heard in my lifetime,” says Mark Purpura, who co-led the group at the time.
During all this, McBride was dating a trans man she’d met at an LGBTQ pride event at the White House in 2012, Andrew Cray. The pair moved in together, met each other’s families and worked together at the Center for American Progress. Life seemed perfect before his cancer diagnosis.
McBride took weeks off work to care for Cray during his treatments. The pair wed on their apartment rooftop, Cray barely strong enough to say his vows. He died four days later. McBride still wears her wedding ring.
That experience would later inspire her leading legislative achievement, Delaware’s new statewide paid family and medical leave program.
After her husband’s death, she took a job at the Human Rights Campaign, becoming its national spokesperson. Jay Brown, now the advocacy group’s chief of staff, says he always expected McBride would go places.
“When you work in Washington, you meet so many people who you think might have the ambition to run for office — you don’t always want them to be the ones running for office,” he says. “Sarah is the one you want running for office.”
On the trail in Delaware
Walking door to door, McBride chats with voters like they’re old friends catching up over coffee. Granted, this is an upscale neighborhood in her state Senate district full of not just likely voters, but potential donors. Still, she seems to know everyone.
She remembers names and faces from brief interactions years ago — recalling, for instance, exactly where she first met a jogger who stopped to talk. (It was a drizzly, unseasonably warm winter day back in early 2020 over on Riddle Avenue.) McBride’s campaign manager swears it’s not an act for an out-of-state reporter.
“It’s a state of neighbors,” McBride says, before dropping an adage about the First State: “Everyone’s dated, mated or related.”
That line echoes throughout the day. One voter laughs with McBride about the “incestuous” nature of Delaware politics, and at a fish fry later that afternoon, retiring Sen. Tom Carper takes a break from working the crowd — you’d think he was still running — to share his opinion about McBride, who went to preschool with one of his kids.
“We’ve been friends with her family forever. Their home church, Westminster Presbyterian in Wilmington, is our home church as well. And so we’re close, we’re almost related,” Carper says, before adding, with a mischievous grin: “Other than that, we don’t like her.”
Her presumed Republican opponent, Donyale Hall, declined to take any personal digs at McBride in a phone interview, saying, “there’s nothing that I would say against any other candidate.” With neither facing serious competition in their respective primaries next month, the pair will likely square off in November.
Instead, Hall focused on issues like inflation and her own qualifications as a mother of 10 children, small-business owner and Air Force veteran. “Businesses are feeling the pinch of some of the things that Sen. McBride has championed,” she says. “The (family and medical leave) bill has put some very difficult burdens on businesses.”
As of the end of June, McBride had outraised Hall, $2.6 million to $21,000.
McBride doesn’t need to work this hard to win in November. But eking out a victory says one thing about the public’s willingness to support a trans politician; crushing the vote says something else, like she did in her state Senate race. She won that seat in 2020 with 73% of the vote, up from the prior Democrat’s 56%.
He may not live in Delaware, but Brown of HRC, a transgender man, says McBride’s success would feel personal. “She’ll give me a sense of hope and what’s possible,” he says. “She will prove to folks that we are more than just that one part of ourselves. … She’ll certainly make history, but she will also do a whole lot of good for a whole lot of reasons, well beyond who she is as a trans person.”
And a House seat might be just the first step, says Purpura. “I don’t think there is a ceiling for her. She could be governor, she could be senator, she could even be president one day.”
But, he adds, McBride has her doubts voters will ever be that accepting.
“She likes to joke and say there’s no way there’ll be another Delawarean president.”
Nina Heller contributed to this report.
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