Former Delaware State Housing Authority director Eugene Young announced Wednesday that he was dropping out of the Sept. 10 Democratic primary, leaving state Sen. Sarah McBride on a glide path to become the first openly trans person to ever serve in Congress.
Young, who had the support of Gov. John Carney, was the only notable candidate vying with McBride for the Democratic nomination to replace Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester as Delaware’s lone House member. (Blunt Rochester is all but assured of making history herself as both the first woman and first African American to ever represent the state in the Senate.) Still, he faced a tough battle against McBride, who ended March with a huge $1.9 million to $400,000 advantage in cash on hand.
The First State’s candidate filing deadline—which is always one of the last in the nation—isn’t until July 9, but it would be a huge surprise if any serious candidates entered the primary with so little time left on the clock. And given Delaware’s reliably blue lean, the Democratic nominee is all but assured victory in the general election, especially in a year when favorite son Joe Biden is leading the ticket.
McBride won elected office for the first time in 2020 at the age of 30 when she became the first openly trans person to serve in the upper chamber of any state legislature. (Fellow Democrat Danica Roem became the second following her victory last year for a state Senate seat in Virginia.)
Describing that first campaign on “The Downballot” podcast last year, McBride said she “knew that the focus in the media was going to be around the uniqueness of my candidacy and the historic nature of the campaign.” As a consequence, she knew she would “have to go out of my way to reinforce for folks that the most formative experience in my life is not my gender identity.” That event, she explained, was her role in caring for her husband, who died after a battle with oral cancer.
While her gender identity remained a focus of media attention, McBride said that it “almost never came up on the campaign trail, and in the few instances where it came up, a smaller portion of those few instances were people with just genuinely earnest questions.”
The state senator, when asked about her potential to make history at a time when Republicans are making opposition to trans rights a central part of their agenda, responded, “I think there’s an important role that each person can have in Congress to push back. And I think without, though, a trans voice helping that effort, there’s a lot of potential that’s not met.”
McBride is now poised to win a seat in Congress, a victory she said she hopes will pave the way to more electoral success for other trans people.
“[T]he only way I can truly do right by the trans community is first and foremost just to be the best member of Congress or the best state senator that I can be,” she said. “And that will go a long way implicitly in pushing back, but also helping to create more doors and more opportunities for more trans people to serve in Congress because one out of 435 is still not representative of the population as a whole.”
