Sarah McBride ‘not running to be the trans representative in Congress’

First published Thursday, Sept. 7, 2023 in the Washington Blade.

Sarah McBride is running for Delaware’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. If you ask her what the most important issues are for voters, she’ll tick off several things: The cost of education, prescription drugs, housing, fear of gun violence, fear of the Supreme Court, the wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation across the nation.

What’s not among them? Her gender identity – the fact that she’s transgender. But we journalists mention it at every turn – you’d be forgiven for wondering whether we know anything else about her. Even at MSNBC, the cozy cable home for liberals, her identity takes center stage.

“Sarah McBride campaigns to be first openly transgender member of Congress,” the lower third blares during McBride’s July 15 MSNBC interview.

“McBride on historic run for Congress,” another says.

“McBride would be the first transgender member of Congress if elected,” a third reads.

And every time her interviewer mentions it, she notes something along the lines of what she told MSNBC anchor Katie Phang: “I’m not running to be the transgender representative in Congress, I’m running to serve Delaware and to make progress on all the issues that matter.”
It begins to resemble a tango – only where the two dancers are dancing to two completely different songs. If it annoys her, she won’t say so publicly.

“Of course there’s going to be discussion about the potential of this campaign to break this barrier and to increase diversity in Congress and to ensure that a voice that has been totally absent from the halls of Congress is finally there in an elected capacity,” McBride says in a recent interview with the Blade. “While it’s not what this campaign is focused on, while it’s not what voters are focused on, it is certainly relevant to the young people who are feeling alone and scared right now.”

She’s running in a crowded primary against rising Delaware political star Eugene Young and former Delaware State Treasurer Colleen Davis. Curtis Morris Aiken and Alexander Nevin Geise, a Universal Life Church minister, have also filed to run, but neither has a campaign website. The primary is slated for April 2, 2024.

McBride, though, has a unique advantage – national name recognition and a close relationship with the Democratic Party’s elite, including President Joe Biden. She formed that relationship working to get Beau Biden, the president’s son, elected as Delaware’s attorney general in 2010 while studying at American University.

McBride continued to work in politics afterwards, later becoming the university’s student body president. In the last few days of her tenure in 2012, she announced something big: She is a woman, she is transgender. The announcement made waves in local and national media. Beau Biden called her to tell her he was proud of her. And then Joe Biden told her he was proud as well when she took a picture with him.

“Hey, kid, I just wanted to let you know I am so proud of you, and Beau is so proud of you, and Jill is so proud of you,” Biden, then the country’s vice president, told McBride. “And I’m so happy that you’re happy.”

Some years later, after pressing for legislation protecting trans Delawareans from discrimination, she got the chance to speak at the Democratic National Convention. Her 2016 speech paid tribute to her late husband, endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and advocated for a better tomorrow. It moved some in the thousands-strong crowd to tears – and others to their feet.

“My name is Sarah McBride and I am a proud transgender American,” she told the crowd, beaming.

Four years later in 2020, she became the highest-ranking transgender person in the country in her role as a Delaware state Senator representing parts of Wilmington. A year later, President Biden appointed her to the Democratic National Committee’s Executive Committee. Her deep entrenchment in politics is reflected in her fundraising: As of the last filing period, July 15, she had already raised more than $400,000. Her opponents haven’t had to open their books yet, so we can’t compare fundraising.

But if you’re holding your breath, waiting for the president’s endorsement in the Delaware house race — don’t.

“The president is focused on his own race,” McBride says.

And McBride is focused on her race, hunting for votes wherever she can. She “fully” expects to go up and down the small state, she says, to every town, municipality, and everything in between to talk to voters. She’s not shying away from Delaware’s conservative-leaning, rural Sussex County either — despite roughly 60% of Sussex voters voting for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

“No voter is going to agree with me on every issue, and there will be some voters who will disagree with me on most issues, but that won’t stop me from fighting for them,” she emphasizes. “In the Delaware state Senate, almost every bill that I have passed has passed with bipartisan majorities.”

That’s Delaware though. National politics are a horse of a different color. Not that that worries McBride – she’s progressive and will push for progressive policies, she says, but will work with Republicans as much as she can. Sure, she says, there are major disagreements, but beyond the drama and the fever-pitched headlines, there’s actually a lot of agreement – though not enough for her to expect any endorsements from Republicans.

Meanwhile, the so-called culture wars dominate the national conversation. The Human Rights Campaign issued a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States, counting a record 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills signed into law just six months into 2023.

McBride has gotten her fair share of threats herself, to the point where she says she hasn’t had a job where she hasn’t received death threats and transphobic attacks.

“When I was making the decision whether to run, one of the things I had to grapple with was the risk that comes with it at a moment where politicians have so clearly tried to dehumanize the trans community,” she said. “I know that with dehumanizing rhetoric comes dehumanization. And with dehumanization, hate and violence become that much more possible.”

Still, she says, anti-trans politicians and activists shouldn’t be able to restrict trans people from participating in democracy, to scare trans people into silence. The LGBTQ community is more united than ever, she says.

It’s clear the attacks won’t silence her – she expects to be a force to be reckoned with if she is elected to Congress, even as a first-term legislator. She points out that she managed to pass a bill for paid family leave starting in 2026 – despite the political observers laughing in her face – through the Delaware Legislature in her first term.

On the issues, though, McBride is harder to pin down beyond the statements on her website. She’s running to represent a state whose fifth-largest industry is agriculture, for example, but her website doesn’t mention agriculture. McBride says it’s just a matter of time.

“We’re going to be further building out the policy agenda,” she says. “I don’t know that anyone has any specific details on foreign policy or agricultural policy on their websites yet.”

She then pivots to a familiar talking point – farmers and agriculture workers, just like her, know what it’s like to be underrepresented in government. She knows what it’s like to be “unseen and unheard” by the government. She knows what it’s like to be attacked by her own government. She’s secured the endorsement of Delaware’s United Food and Commercial Workers. She’s running to represent all Delawareans and she’s listening to all of them on her tour through the state.

“A campaign is a conversation,” she emphasizes.

The time for conversation is quickly running out, though, when it comes to mitigating the climate crisis. Delaware is the lowest-lying state in the country, making it even more vulnerable to rising seas and flooding. The Sierra Club’s Delaware chapter has endorsed her twice, but McBride’s climate policy proposals are so far murky. The U.S. must become carbon neutral by 2050, she says – something Delaware has already committed to.

We need “bold goals,” she says, to achieve carbon neutrality, to prevent the country from emitting more greenhouse gases than its forests, shrubs, grasslands, sea grasses, and more can remove.

So do we need a carbon tax, where emitters have to pay for every ton of greenhouse gases they emit? She didn’t directly answer. A ban on new fossil fuel projects? She didn’t directly answer. Don’t we need to move away from carbon credits, which in theory certify that one ton of carbon dioxide hasn’t been released into the atmosphere thanks to the purchase, given how hard it is to prove that toxic gasses weren’t released because of the purchase and the questionable investments that are made? It’s not an issue that has come up yet, she says. In general, we need to invest in new technologies, figure out ways to reduce the climate crisis impact, find ways to emit less, she emphasizes.

An important step forward, McBride said, is the Inflation Reduction Act. It invested billions into clean energy and tax breaks for electric cars and energy efficient home upgrades and could save roughly 3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases according to the U.S. Department of Energy. She supports the law despite its greenlighting of the Mountain Valley Pipeline across West Virginia thanks to a deal struck with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.

“Look, I think that most bills that have passed have components that many of us would not like,” she says. “And oftentimes those components are necessary to pass the bill.”

And she’s itching to pass bills and bring a fresh perspective to Congress. It seems few things will stop her — she’s determined to put in the work to win.

“This is a real race,” she says. “We’re leaving no stone unturned.”