Sarah McBride's historic run for Congress was decades in the making

Dave McBride recalls the moment he knew his daughter, Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride, was destined for the political stage.

She was about 11 years old and had a pressing question for her father after he finished teaching Sunday school at their local church.

“Where’d you get that podium?” Dave remembers his daughter asking, throwing him for a loop. Three weeks later, he was in for a surprise.

“I come home one day from work, walk over to her bedroom door … she has an American flag draped over the window, she has the podium, she’s created a cardboard presidential seal and she’s reciting FDR’s 1932 inaugural address. And I thought, ‘We’re in trouble,’” the retired lawyer said with a laugh.

A decade later, on Christmas Day in 2011, McBride came out to her parents as a transgender woman. Her mother, Sally, said looking back, she’s not proud of how she and Dave initially reacted.

“We knew we’d do whatever she needed us to do, but I thought her life was over,” Sally said from an armchair in McBride’s childhood home in Wilmington. “I thought she’d be discriminated against at every turn. I was frightened for her safety.”

She and Dave also worried McBride’s political aspirations would be limited. They didn’t expect that over the next decade their daughter would make history over and over again. Now McBride, 34, is heavily favored to win Delaware’s only House seat in November. The victory would make her the country’s first openly transgender member of Congress.

“If you had told us in 2011 that we would be here now,” Sally said, through tears, “it’s amazing. It has been the most incredible journey.”

For her part, McBride, a Democrat, said becoming a historic first wouldn’t be enough — she wants to ensure she’s not the last.

“For someone who’s scared and feels alone, it could potentially be a lifesaving message to go to sleep in November seeing that someone like them is able to fully participate in our democracy, that they can be seen as full human beings,” McBride said in the living room of her Wilmington condo after a few hours of knocking on constituents’ doors. “They can be judged and evaluated as candidates for public office on their merits and their ideas, and that maybe, just maybe, the heart of this country is big enough to love them.”

‘This changes everything’

McBride is, in a word, a nerd: She has built Lego models of federal buildings, including the White House and the U.S. Capitol building. She spouts random history facts, noting that the ballroom of the Hotel du Pont in downtown Wilmington was the site of Joe Biden’s election night celebration in 1972, when he won his first Senate race. Her staff also put a poster of the cartoon alter ego of Disney’s Lizzie McGuire in her office, in part because she admitted the movie’s theme song has “been stuck in my head perpetually for 20 years,” because “it’s an annoying f-----g song.”

The energy McBride brings to politics sometimes feels similar to that of Leslie Knope from “Parks and Recreation.” When she arrived at the first of 15 polling locations at 7:15 a.m. on primary day, she stepped out of the car, coffee in hand, and yelled, “Can you feel the democracy in the air?”

Her fascination with political history dates back to her childhood, as McBride details in her 2018 memoir, “Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss and the Fight for Trans Equality.”

In 2002, at 11 years old, she met then-Sen. Biden, her “political idol” and a fellow Delawarean, at a local pizzeria. Biden ripped a page from his daily briefing book, signed it and wrote, “Remember me when you are president,” McBride recalls in her book — for which Biden wrote the foreword — calling it her most prized possession as a kid.

By the time she was 20, McBride had volunteered or worked on at least three political campaigns, including Beau Biden’s 2006 campaign for Delaware attorney general and his 2010 re-election campaign.

Though she excelled in politics, McBride wrote that since she was a child, she felt like she was living someone else’s life. She knew she was transgender from a young age, but her earliest exposure to trans people was through jokes about them on TV. She said she threw herself into politics in part to create a more loving and inclusive world where others could be themselves, even if she couldn’t.

“Something became abundantly clear to me as I read my history books: No one like me had ever made it very far. Or, at least, no one who had come out and lived their truth,” she wrote.

But in 2011, at 21, “the pain had become too much,” she wrote. She came out to a close friend and then her family shortly after. Four months later, on her last day as American University’s student body president — a highly coveted position at the hyperpolitical school — she came out on Facebook and in the student newspaper. The announcement went viral.

Lisa Goodman, the founding president of Equality Delaware, a statewide LGBTQ organization, worked at the same law firm as McBride’s father. After McBride came out, Dave and Sally talked to Goodman in her office for three hours, Goodman remembered, and she said two things that stuck with them.

“I said, ‘This changes everything,’” Goodman recalled, regarding McBride’s ability to help lobby for state legislation that would help trans people. “I also said, ‘Sarah is going to do more as Sarah than you ever imagined.’”

Both statements proved true. In the fall of 2012, McBride became the first out trans woman to work in the White House when she interned for the Obama administration. The following year, she was integral to helping pass a bill in Delaware that protected transgender people from discrimination.

In 2013, shortly after graduating college, McBride joined the Center for American Progress to work on LGBTQ policy. Then in 2016, she joined the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, as its national press secretary. That same year, she became the first trans person to speak at a major political convention when she gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention.

However, in between doing work that she loved, McBride’s life took a heartbreaking turn.

‘First principles’

McBride married Andrew Cray in August 2014, four days before he died of oral cancer. Even now, McBride said she still holds close a number of lessons Cray and their relationship taught her. Cray, who was a trans attorney for the Center for American Progress, understood that change-making requires nuance and “meeting people where they are,” she said.

“At the end of the day, we can say the right things,” McBride said. “But if we aren’t actually able to deliver real and tangible results for people, if we aren’t actually able to deliver change, then none of it matters. And I think he really, more than any person I’ve ever met, was able to bridge all of those, not just complexities, but in many cases contradictions, and figure out how to move forward.”

McBride said Cray had a childlike goofiness, similar to one of her favorite TV characters, Ted Lasso.

They met at a White House Pride celebration in June 2012. They started dating, and their relationship was “built on a unique shared experience: the by-product of years of each of us fighting to be ourselves,” McBride wrote in her memoir.

When McBride and Cray moved in together in 2013, she “felt more fulfilled and happier than I’d ever imagined.” But then Cray was diagnosed with oral cancer after seeing a doctor about a sore on his tongue. After surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, he was declared cancer-free in the spring of 2014 only for the cancer to return a few months later. As Cray, who was just 28, became increasingly ill, McBride was his caretaker. They married in August on the rooftop of their apartment building shortly before he died.

Bridging contradictions and showing up

McBride’s closest friends in politics say she shares that same ability Cray had to “bridge contradictions” and to actually create change. The best example of that, they said, was her work to pass paid family leave in Delaware.

McBride was elected to the state Senate in November 2020, making her the country’s first openly trans state senator. In her first term, she successfully sponsored and helped pass the Healthy Delaware Families Act, a program that will allow covered employees to take up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave and up to six weeks of paid leave for medical needs or family caregiving. The governor signed the program into law in May 2022, and it takes effect Jan. 1, 2026.

Jesse Chadderdon, who has known McBride since 2014 and is now the chief of staff for the Delaware state Senate’s majority caucus, said after her election, McBride had the political muscle and reputation to push paid leave through with little negotiation. However, she set up meetings with relevant stakeholders so that more people would be invested in the policy’s long-term success.

“It was sort of a moment of political genius that was so centered on caring about the policy, and yes, about her legacy, but a legacy about getting paid leave right in Delaware, and not about being seen as this conquering hero who ran roughshod over people to do it,” Chadderdon said.

Taylor Hawk, the director of legislative and political strategy at the Delaware State Education Association who has now become one of McBride’s close friends, sat in on one of the meetings McBride had with small-business owners in Sussex County, the one county in the state that went to Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

“I would say it was not a friendly room,” Hawk said. They “were very wary of paid leave and how it would impact their businesses and their employees … and her ability to both be incredibly technically competent when speaking to the policy, but also interweave in just the absolute fundamental and human importance of providing this benefit to people was really cool.”

McBride said she held that meeting because “you can’t underestimate how important showing up is.”

“Not only do I think it’s the right thing to do, I also think it’s incredibly helpful in policy conversations to show up where people are and show them that respect,” McBride said.

‘An absolute game changer’

State Sen. Bryan Townsend, the Senate majority leader, said the state Senate will miss McBride, whom he described as “exceptionally influential,” and he will be interested to see what she can do in a “dysfunctional” Congress.

In between knocking on constituents’ doors the day before the September primary, McBride said that dysfunction is why she’s running.

“I think it’s exactly the type of people who know how to make government work, who know how to legislate, that we need to step up to run for federal office,” she said.

She added, “One of the biggest threats to our democracy is the longer-term crisis of hope that I think people are feeling around the belief that we don’t have this individual or collective capacity to beat the scope and the scale of the challenges that we face anymore.”

Among the key priorities for McBride’s congressional run are expanding access to affordable health care, increasing the minimum wage and protecting reproductive rights. She’ll face Republican John Whalen III, a retired police officer and former owner of a construction company, in November. Whalen filed to run in the Republican primary about a week before the July 9 deadline and beat opponent Donyale Hall, an Air Force veteran who was endorsed by the state GOP. His priorities include stopping illegal immigration, reducing the federal debt and opposing Biden’s “war on fossil fuels.” Whalen declined to comment about his candidacy or McBride’s.

Democrats have held the seat they’re running for since 2010.

As for what could be next after Congress, a few of McBride’s close friends said she commands the room in the way a president would when she walks in. At least one person said they wouldn’t be surprised if she ran for the nation’s highest office.

When asked about the possibility, McBride laughed loudly and snorted — a characteristic she’s known for and that Dave said she gets from her mother.

“I think I wanted to be president when I was, like, 5 years old,” she said. “But, no, honestly, I like naps too much to want to be president. I also think we’ve taken the ‘anyone could be president’ a little too literally over the last eight years. And there’s one big reason that I would never get elected, and that’s because I think there’s probably only room for one Delawarean as president in my lifetime.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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