Sarah McBride is raking in campaign cash just days after announcing run for Congress

Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride (D) is raking in campaign cash since announcing her campaign to become the first out transgender member of the U.S. Congress.

“In just the first five days of this campaign, we raised more than $414,000, including the generous support of almost 550 Delaware donors from every corner of this state,” she tweeted with an image from her second-quarter report.

Related:

Trans activist Sarah McBride’s appearance on Seth Meyers’ show is everything

McBride was the first transgender person to speak at the Democratic National Convention and has been a prominent force in the trans community.

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McBride’s impressive numbers come just days after she announced her campaign on June 26 for the House seat left open by Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) after she announced that she is running for the seat left open by retiring Sen. Tom Carper (D).

McBride talked with CNN’s Jake Tapper earlier this week and said that her being transgender means she knows “what it’s like to feel like your government doesn’t have your back.”

“Whether you understand what it’s like to be me [or not], you don’t have to understand me for me to fight for you,” she said.

In a video interview with Politico last week, she called anti-transgender legislation that many states have passed “cruel solutions in search of a problem.”

“They are a response to a fabricated crisis that is seeking to divide and distract from the fact that MAGA Republicans have absolutely no agenda for workers and families and a legacy of policy failures,” she said.

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. All of them are cisgender.

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.