WILMINGTON, Del. — Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride won the state’s only House seat Tuesday, NBC News projects, making her the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.
McBride, a Democrat, defeated Republican John Whalen III, taking 57.8% of the vote with 95% of the vote in.
“Tonight is a testament to Delawareans that here in our state of neighbors, we judge candidates based on their ideas and not their identities,” McBride said at Delaware’s Democratic election night celebration Tuesday night.
She thanked her friends and family and her late husband, Andy Cray, who died of cancer in 2014, just days after their wedding.
“My time with Andy reinforced for me a simple truth, that hope as an emotion, hope as a phenomenon, only makes sense in the face of hardship,” she said. “While at this moment in America’s history, hope sometimes feels hard to come by, we must never forget that we are the beneficiaries of seemingly impossible change.”
McBride’s key priorities for her congressional run were expanding access to affordable health care, protecting reproductive rights and increasing the minimum wage. She told NBC News in September that her goal in Congress was to work with colleagues to break through the partisan gridlock and actually pass legislation — which she became known for during her time in Delaware’s Senate. During her first term, she helped pass universal paid family and medical leave across the state.
Jake Carpenter, 42, works in finance for a college near Lincoln, Delaware, and said he met McBride at a meet and greet in August, when he asked her, “What have you promised, and how have you done it?” She walked him through the policies she worked on in the state Senate, and “she won me over,” he said.
“I knew that she was trans, and being gay myself, I wanted to see someone like me, someone part of my community, be successful,” Carpenter said. “She’s like a hero to me.”
He knocked on dozens of doors in Sussex County, the only majority Republican county in the state, to talk to people about McBride’s platform. He said he persuaded six Republicans to vote for McBride.
He added that he’s an adviser to an LGBTQ club at the college he works for and that “for my trans students, this is a really big deal.”
Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, described McBride’s win as “a landmark achievement on the march toward equality.”
“This historic victory reflects not only increasing acceptance of transgender people in our society, ushered in by the courage of visible leaders like Sarah, but also her dogged work in demonstrating that she is an effective lawmaker who will deliver real results,” Robinson said in a statement, adding that HRC is proud to see McBride, who previously was the organization’s national press secretary, “reshaping the halls of Congress.”
McBride is no stranger to making history. She initially made headlines in April 2012 when she came out as trans in American University’s student newspaper at the end of her term as the student body president.
The same year, she became the first out trans woman to work in the White House when she interned with the Obama administration, according to her 2018 memoir, “Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality.”
Then, in 2016, she became the first trans person to speak at a major political convention when she gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
In 2020, she was elected to represent Delaware’s 1st Senate District, which includes Claymont, Bellefonte and parts of Edgemoor and Wilmington, becoming the country’s first openly trans state senator.
McBride became interested in politics from a young age. By the time she was 18, she had volunteered or worked on at least three political campaigns, including Beau Biden’s 2006 campaign for attorney general and his 2010 re-election campaign. Nearly a decade later, Joe Biden wrote the foreword to her memoir.
McBride said that while she was voting Tuesday, she was reflecting on how powerful it was to vote for Kamala Harris for president; Lisa Blunt Rochester, who won her Senate race and will become the first woman and first Black person to represent Delaware in the Senate; and then herself.
“That ticket is not an ultimate destination, but it is a reflection of how far we’ve come, that no matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from or the gender with which you identify, that you can live your truth and dream big dreams all at the same time,” McBride said. “It’s not the end, but it’s the beginning.”
McBride’s historic win comes during an election cycle where Republicans have leaned into anti-transgender rhetoric and political ads. The GOP spent more than $200 million on network television ads targeting trans people this year, according to data shared with NBC News on Tuesday by AdImpact, an analytics firm that tracks political ad spending. Former President Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have embraced anti-trans rhetoric on the campaign trail, and during the Republican National Convention in July, at least a dozen speakers mentioned gender or sexuality negatively in their speeches, according to an NBC News analysis.
