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

WILMINGTON, Del. — 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.”