- Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride is running for a seat in the US House of Representatives.
- If she wins, she'll be the nation's first openly transgender member of Congress.
Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride announced her plans to run for Congress on Monday. If she wins in November 2024, she'll become the nation's first openly-transgender member of Congress.
McBride, 32, is running to replace current Democratic Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who recently announced a Senate run to replace outgoing Sen. Tom Carper, in the state's at-large congressional district.
Elected as a state senator in 2020, McBride is the highest-ranking transgender legislator in the United States. In 2022, she ran again for her seat, but instead unopposed.
In an interview with Bloomberg Government, an adviser to McBride said her campaign would focus on "kitchen-table issues" like her work passing paid family and medical leave during her short stint in Delaware's statehouse.
McBride, who publicly came out as transgender in 2012 in a student newspaper op-ed as the outgoing student body president of American University, previously interned in the Obama Administration, becoming the first openly transgender person to work in the White House.
McBride also has ties to current President Joe Biden and his family. She worked on Beau Biden's campaigns for attorney general. The president (then vice president) also wrote a forward for her memoir in 2018.
She's also no stranger to the national political scene, having spoken at the Democratic National Convention in 2016.
Outside of politics, McBride has also served as the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.
When asked how she'll fare against a barrage of verbal and political attacks as she seeks to become the nation's first openly transgender federal legislator, she told the New York Times that "there will certainly be attacks, but I'm no stranger to those."
"What I've demonstrated over the last few years is that I'm able to move past those attacks and focus on what matters to the people I represent.