Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride (D) is currently the highest-ranking transgender elected official in the country. Now she has announced a bid for federal office, running for a seat left open by Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), who announced that she is running for the seat left open by Sen. Tom Carper (D), who is retiring.
“My commitment is to the people in Delaware who aren’t seen,” she said in a video announcing her campaign. “Everyone deserves a member of Congress who sees them and who respects them.”
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There are currently 12 out LGBTQ+ people serving in Congress – two in the Senate and ten in the House. Almost all of them – except for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I) and Rep. George Santos (R) – are Democrats.
But all of them are cisgender. If McBride is successful, she would be the first out transgender person elected to Congress.
She stressed that she is running to represent Delaware in the House: “I’m not running to be a trans member of Congress,” she told the News-Journal.
But McBride is cognizant of the significance of diversity in higher office.
“Time and time again, I’ve had the opportunity to see there is space for people of all different backgrounds, including trans people, in our politics,” McBride told LGBTQ Nation in 2020.
Delaware is a solidly blue state, with 59% of voters in 2020 casting ballots for President Joe Biden, two Democratic U.S. senators, a Democratic governor, a Democratic state attorney general, and Democrats in control of both chambers of the state legislature. Still, she will have to win the Democratic primary in order to make it into Congress.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that McBride is running for the Senate seat left open by Carper and not the House seat left open by Rochester. We regret the error.
