Delaware’s Sarah McBride already made history once when she became the first openly transgender person elected to a state Senate anywhere in the country in 2020. Now she can do so again in her bid for Congress—and she’s joining us on this week’s episode of “The Downballot” to discuss her path-breaking campaign. McBride explains how her gender identity helped spur her to run for office in the first place; why she focused on passing paid family and medical leave once in the legislature; and the difference she thinks her presence on Capitol Hill could make in the face of the escalating right-wing assault on the trans community. Stepping aside from politics for a moment, she also offers advice to young trans people encountering an often hostile world.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard, meanwhile, discuss why we just saw an avalanche of campaign launches following the July 4 holiday and dig into several of the most important kickoffs. There are bellwether House races in tossup districts like Michigan’s 7th, where both parties just landed their preferred candidates, as well as Nebraska’s 2nd, where the Democrat who lost a close race last year unexpectedly announced a rematch. There’s also the Senate contest in perpetually swingy Nevada, where a former GOP outsider is now the establishment favorite, as well as the open governor’s race in Washington, where a former Republican congressman has come out of retirement but faces serious headwinds.
Subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts to make sure you never miss a show—new episodes every Thursday! A full transcript of this week’s show is below.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Beard: Hello and welcome. I’m David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir: And I’m David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. “The Downballot” is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. Please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
Beard: It’s announcement week. Apparently, we’ve got a fair number of those.
Nir: Oh yeah, we do. There were more than a dozen candidates who have announced campaigns in the last week or so. We’re going to talk about why that rush happened all at once, and we’re also going to dive into a few critical contests that will likely be bellwethers next year, including House races in Michigan and Nebraska, a key Senate race in Nevada, and also the Washington governor’s race, which landed a prominent GOP candidate, but actually might not wind up being all that competitive in the end.
Then, we have a truly extraordinary interview coming up with a groundbreaking candidate for office. Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride was the first openly trans person elected to a state senate anywhere in the country when she first won office in 2020. She is now running for Congress and would once again make history as the first trans member of Congress. It really is an exceptional discussion. We have a fantastic episode for you. Let’s get rolling.
So 4th of July, quiet week, but then boom. This week, all of a sudden, we had a ton of candidates launching campaigns all at once. Beard, what the hell is going on?
Beard: Yeah, it’s a relatively sleepy time in terms of politics. It’s the summer, August recess is coming up. There’s a lot of vacations that are going on. But in terms of campaigns, despite it being an odd-numbered year and looking ahead to 2024, a lot of those 2024 campaigns are launching now, and there’s a particular reason for that.
It’s because everybody wants to launch their campaigns at the beginning of a quarter, and the quarters are, of course, each three months of the year. And so, they wanted to have a full three months to raise money so that when their first financial reports come out after the end of that quarter, it can look as impressive as possible.
So that’s why you don’t see very many candidates launching in June because, say, if you launch June 10th, you have about 20 days to raise money before you have to file your first financial report, and people are going to see it and maybe not be very impressed, [even] if there was a good reason: that you only had three weeks to do it in. So you want to take that three months, you want to have a big splash for your first financial report. And so that’s why we’ve seen a lot of people announcing, and particularly people announced this past Monday because last week was a holiday. Particularly with July 4th being on a Tuesday, it was really a hard week to make any news. And so we saw a bunch of candidates launch in early July, and specifically on July 10th, to kickstart their campaign and to have a good long fundraising quarter for quarter three.
Nir: Yet some candidates do wind up launching at the tail end of a quarter, and there are a lot of reasons for that. If someone announces a retirement at the end of the quarter and you want to jump in right away, you don’t want to waste any time, then sure you’re going to do it.
And I also think that with, at least on the Democratic side, the salience of online fundraising, you can in a week’s time, if you have a strong network, raise a lot of money. And you put out that press release and it says $4,000 raised in 10 days. That actually does look pretty good. But definitely most campaigns still follow this traditional idea of wanting to have as much of the quarter as possible. And these campaigns, they won’t release their fundraising reports until October, so it really is a long way off.
Nathan Gonzalez at Roll Call had a really good article examining this phenomenon, and he counted 11 congressional candidates who launched on this past Monday. We’re not going to mention all of them, but there are a few key races that we do want to discuss.
The first one is Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. This is a key swing seat in the Lansing area that’s been left open by Democratic Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, who is running for Michigan’s open Senate seat.
Now, Joe Biden won this district by just half a point. But last year, Slotkin defeated Republican Tom Barrett by a 52-46 margin, which all things considered, especially since it was a midterm, was actually a pretty strong result. And Republicans spent very, very heavily. This was, by our metrics, the second most expensive House race in the entire nation. Barrett, on Monday, just announced that he’d try again and he’s likely to be the GOP nominee, but there were dueling announcements.
The likely Democratic nominee also announced on Monday that he’s going to run. That’s Curtis Hertel. He, like Barrett, is also a former state senator. Hertel is very well-connected. Many members of his family also hold public office. He just stepped down as a top aide to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who, of course, bestrides Michigan politics like a Colossus, and he already has Slotkin’s endorsement. So I think it’s probably pretty unlikely that any other Democrats could really run against him or threaten him.
Barrett, last year—part of the reason why he lost, I have no doubt, is that he ran this really far-right extremist campaign. He coddled vaccine conspiracy theorists. He ran really ugly transphobic attacks. He just doesn’t seem like a good fit for this swingy sort of seat.
And we know that Michigan Democrats were seriously pumped up last year for a variety of reasons. I can’t really think of a reason why they’d be any less pumped up next year, can you? And so it feels like Barrett needs something to change that is completely outside of his control. I mean, yeah, he should probably moderate his campaign, but I don’t feel like that’s going to be enough.
Beard: Yeah. I think the one thing that he sort of has going for him is, of course, Slotkin was an extremely strong incumbent that he was running against, and that’s always very tough even in a year where you expect to have the wind at your back. And Hertel, of course, is not an incumbent. It is an open seat. So you can sort of point to that as one thing that might be more in his favor in 2024.
But I do agree that on the whole, I think that it’ll be, if anything, tougher. I think with presidential-level turnout, with sort of, I think, the negatives that he built up over the course of the 2022 campaign, I don’t really expect him to be in a stronger position in 2024.
And this is a really important seat. I think it’s really almost a quintessential swing seat. It’s of course drawn by Michigan’s new independent redistricting commission so it’s very fair. As you mentioned, Biden won it very, very narrowly, but it’s very narrowly also to the right of the country as a whole because Biden won it by less than he won the country as a whole.
And so this is really a seat where Republicans need to compete. They need to be able to win this kind of seat because the five-seat majority is extremely tenuous. That’s what they’re working with right now. I definitely think there are going to be seats that Democrats pick up in 2024 if that year is at all competitive, which I’m sure it will be. And so they’re going to need to look to offensive potentials and this is the kind of seat they would want to put in play. And I don’t really think Barrett is the kind of candidate that makes you think, “Oh man, I’m really worried now.” Of course, if it’s a great Republican year, everything’s on the table, but he’s going to need outside help, like you said.
Nir: Yeah. I think we’re going to be talking about this race as a bellwether in a year from now, close to the 2024 elections. And another race that is also probably going to be a bellwether that saw a major new entrant is the Senate contest in Nevada where we just had a barnburner last year and probably will have another extremely close contest next year.
Beard: Yes. Nevada just keeps delivering every cycle with these extremely close races. Fortunately, at least on the Senate level, Democrats keep winning these extremely close races in recent years. We’re going to hope that continues.
The candidate who announced recently was Sam Brown. He’s a veteran who went from really the anti-establishment outsider in 2022, when he ran against establishment favorite Adam Laxalt in the GOP primary for Senate and lost, to now the establishment favorite. He got really good reviews, I guess, in that race, at least among Republicans, and now the GOP establishment are big fans of his. They’re going all-in on him being their candidate for 2024. He has a really interesting story. His face was badly burned in Afghanistan, and his resulting disfigurement is quite striking and definitely helps him tell his life story.
But of course, like most Republican candidates nowadays, he’s very far to the right. He attacked Laxalt from the right, and Laxalt was already, of course, very conservative. He criticized Laxalt for when he was Attorney General, not suing to overturn the 2020 election results quickly enough. Laxalt did sue to do so, but in Brown’s eyes, he didn’t do so fast enough is the problem.
But of course, as crazy as Brown might be, and as far-right as he might be, there’s always someone crazier. There’s always someone farther to the right. And that is former state Assemblyman and 2022 Secretary of State nominee Jim Marchant. Marchant ran for Secretary of State, got killed as much as you can get killed in the uber-competitive state of Nevada, and of course, did losing stop him or make him think, “Hey, maybe my complete crazy whackjob conspiracy theories are a problem”? No, it made him decide that he should run for Senate in 2024.
So that’s the person Brown’s going to have to beat to just get the nomination. He’s definitely going to have to veer off to the right, embrace the crazies to make sure Marchant doesn’t sneak past him in that direction. So it’ll be interesting to see how that primary develops, and if Brown is able to stay a reasonable general election candidate throughout the primary.
Nir: Yeah. And just to be clear, Marchant, though, he is completely fucking batshit. He lost by two points in Nevada. Anywhere else, that’s terrifyingly close, but like you were saying, Beard, that’s practically a blowout in Nevada terms. And if freshman Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen can win next year by two points, I think Democrats would be really thrilled.
Beard: Yeah. I don’t know why Nevada can’t just have a nice easy year. I think Democrats in Nevada would appreciate that, but it’s probably going to be another tough one. And so they’re going to need to go all out yet again.
Nir: Another tough one, but this time for Republicans, is going to be in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. Their Democrat, Tony Vargas, just announced a rematch against Republican Congressman Don Bacon. Vargas lost just 51-49 last time in a district that Biden carried 52 to 46, and this announcement was actually something of a surprise. There had been almost no chatter about Vargas running a second time. And you know what? I’ve got to give my compliments to his team because I think there’s nothing worse than when you have a potential candidate who has months and months of stories saying maybe they’ll run, sources say he might run, he’s considering a campaign, he might launch then, you sap your own momentum that way. What Vargas did here instead, come strong out the gate, and I think he has a real chance for a different outcome this time. And there’s a few reasons for that.
Bacon’s profile has grown a lot in the last half year or so. He’s emerged as a really prominent ally of Kevin McCarthy. And sometimes, having a higher profile just isn’t a positive, especially when you’re running in a district that the other party’s presidential candidate is likely to win again.
And I also think that abortion is going to be even more salient next year than it was last year. And I say that in part because Nebraska just passed a law banning abortion at 12 weeks. So yeah, Don Bacon isn’t in the Nebraska legislature, but it’s his party that did this. It’s the governor of his party who signed this into law. So this is going to give Vargas an opening. And you know that Joe Biden wants that single electoral vote from Omaha, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he wins by bigger than that six-point margin that he had in 2020 next year. I’m sure they’re going to campaign hard for that, and that’s just a tough environment to find yourself in if you’re Don Bacon.
Beard: Yeah. It’s a very college-educated seat. It’s very central; it’s an urban area and suburban area. And so it’s definitely an area that I think has been moving left. It is not a Trump area. Bacon has, I think, done a reasonably good job of trying to distance himself from the crazies that have taken over practically the entire Republican party. He’s always good for a quote in any of these articles you read, criticizing the House Freedom Caucus, criticizing the far-right in his party, but I haven’t really seen him actually take a lot of votes to sink any of these far-right priorities. He’s always talking a good game, but when McCarthy needs the votes, it’s not been Bacon or any of the other moderates that have actually been sinking stuff. It’s been the far-right.
So I’ll be interested to see if anytime in the next year, he actually goes to the mat and sinks something that’s a big Republican priority to prove his, quote-unquote, moderate bona fides. So we’ll see, but I do think it’s a tough race. It’s a district that, as I said, was going further away from him, and so I think he’s probably going to lose it eventually. 2024 I think is a good chance where that might happen. I think Vargas is a reasonably good candidate for Democrats, so definitely one to keep an eye on.
Nir: Finally, I want to mention really quick one prominent candidate who’s definitely going to face some big headwinds next year. That’s former Republican Congressman Dave Reichert, who announced that he would come out of retirement to run for Washington’s open governorship next year. Now, when he was in office, Reichert had a long history of outperforming the top of the ticket by focusing on his law and order credentials, most notably for his work in bringing the notorious serial killer known as the Green River Killer to justice when he was King County sheriff, though several reporters have since questioned his role. But Reichert hasn’t been on the ballot since 2016 and he last faced a serious race in 2010, and needless to say, in the last dozen-plus years, politics has become even more polarized than it was back then.
Going by the 2020 presidential results, Biden won Washington by more than 19 points. There are only two governors in the whole country who serve states that went for the opposite party by a greater margin. That’s Vermont Republican Phil Scott and Kentucky Democrat Andy Beshear. Now, we don’t know who the Democratic standard-bearer will be next year. There are a number of prominent Democrats running, but I don’t know, Reichert obviously has polling that shows him with a potential path to victory, but this is going to be a presidential year. Biden will probably win Washington by 20 points or maybe even more. Once again, that is just a hell of a difficult headwind to overcome.
Beard: Yeah, I think Reichert is their best candidate probably, but I think that speaks more to the lack of a Washington state bench for the Republican side than any particular great strength of Reichert. I think he’s fine but I do think particularly the fact that Washington state elects their governors in presidential years just makes it so tough in this new polarized era for Republicans to really have any shot, short of a really, really damaged Democratic candidate. I think that’s what he’s going to need and I don’t expect that. I think the leading Democrats are all various levels of fine, and so whoever comes out of that top-two primary to face Reichert I think is going to be a strong, strong favorite.
Nir: And Beard, to your point about Washington being one of those rare states that holds governor elections in presidential years, the last time Republicans won the governorship in Washington was in 1980. There have been some close races since then as we famously have seen, but yeah, that streak, I wouldn’t count on it to end next year.
Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, we have an interview with a fascinating, path-breaking candidate for Delaware’s lone House seat, state Senator Sarah McBride. Please stay with us. It is going to be a fantastic discussion.
We have a very exciting guest joining us on “The Downballot” today. Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride was the first openly transgender state senator elected anywhere in the country after her victorious campaign in 2020. She’s now running for Delaware’s at-large congressional seat because Democratic incumbent Lisa Blunt Rochester recently kicked off a bid for Senate. If elected, Sarah McBride would be the first openly trans member of Congress. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Sarah McBride: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Nir: Well, it’s our pleasure. So let’s take our listeners back a few years to 2019 when you first decided to run for the state Senate, and I want to emphasize, this show, we love to get as deep into the weeds as possible. We have very nerdy hosts, very nerdy listeners, so please don’t hesitate to really walk us through the granular decision-making that you went through. But why did you decide to run back then, and how did the potential of you being the first openly transgender member of the state Senate figure into your decision?
McBride: Sure. Well, I’m actually going to take advantage of that carte blanche to actually go back 20 years…
Nir: Yes, please.
McBride: … to when I was a kid. My journey to running for office in many ways is inextricably linked with my own journey as a trans person and my own journey to coming out, because as a young person, one of the first things I knew about myself is my gender, and about the second thing I knew about myself was that this world wasn’t quite ready for someone like me to live openly and fully. And I felt scared as a young person. I felt alone and I worried that my dreams of finding love, of doing work that I love, of living in a community I loved were mutually exclusive with my identity as a trans person, and I was desperate for sources of hope, for sources of hope that things could get better.
And I was actually really interested in architecture as a kid and used to read books about buildings across the world, and I stumbled across some books about the Capitol and the White House. And what I marveled at in reading those books was not the beauty of the building but the history that occurred within their walls, and this notion that politics is the place where every avenue of society converges and where you can make the most amount of change for the most number of people in the most number of ways possible. And I found hope in that. I found hope that the through-line of the story of the country, the story of the history that occurred within and outside of those buildings, was the through-line of advocates, activists, and a handful of courageous elected officials working together to right the wrongs of our past, to address injustice and to expand justice and equality for more people. And so I got involved in politics at a young age because I was searching for that hope, and that was the place where I found it.
And eventually I came out. I got involved in LGBTQ advocacy, first here in Delaware and then at the federal level, but through it all, what I consistently saw was that government is the place where we can make the most change. It has the most opportunity to make a meaningful and real difference in people’s lives and addressing not just issues of LGBTQ equality but all of the issues that matter to people of every background. And I saw that in that work, in that advocacy work, that diversity in government was critical, that you can’t craft effective policy solutions for a diverse country if you don’t have the full diversity of that country at the table. That’s true in technology, it’s true in business, and it’s certainly true in public policy.
And ultimately, I felt like at that moment, having worked in federal advocacy against the Trump administration, having had the opportunity to work and try to pass positive legislation and beat back negative legislation and just looking at the stakes for our democracy at that moment in time, I felt like this was the place where my voice was most needed at that point in the Delaware General Assembly, by running for office. That decisions are made by those who show up and if I wanted a government that more fully reflected the people it sought to serve in both background and in values, I needed to step up. And so when my longtime state senator decided to retire, I ended up running for the seat that I was born and raised in here in Delaware, the seat that I was back home living in.
I think a lot of people when I ran thought I’m going to run for the opportunity to advance LGBTQ rights in the Delaware General Assembly, and what I tried to make clear was if I wanted to specifically just work on those issues, I could have stayed as an advocate. I wanted to work on all of the issues because at the end of the day, my philosophy in change-making all stems from, back to a quote from one of my favorite poets, Audre Lorde, that there’s no such thing as a single-issue cause because no one lives single-issue lives, and that I was running not to be the transgender state senator but to be the state senator who was working on healthcare and paid family and medical leave. And that was rooted in my experience serving as a caregiver to my husband during his battle with cancer, and I wanted to work on all of those issues.
So I ran, COVID hit, I ran through COVID and got elected in November of 2020. And I’m proud that in my time in the Delaware General Assembly, I think I’ve kept that commitment, that I’m proud of who I am, that I do right by the communities I’m a part of, including the trans community, but that my focus has been on fighting for and actually delivering real change on policies like paid family and medical leave and expanding access to healthcare.
Beard: And we definitely want to get to some of the healthcare legislation that you’ve helped pass in the Delaware State Senate, but first, I do want to ask, as you were going through this campaign and then in your first couple of years being a state senator, was there anything in terms of how the voters or how the constituents or the folks in the State House, how they reacted? Did anything surprise you? Did you have any sort of obstacles you had to work through being the first in this sort of situation?
McBride: Sure. So one of the things I knew when I announced for the state senate, similarly to when I announced for Congress, I knew that the focus in the media was going to be around the uniqueness of my candidacy and the historic nature of the campaign. That it was going to be about my identity and that I was going to have to go out of my way to reinforce for folks that the most formative experience in my life is not my gender identity. It’s a critical part of who I am but that the most formative experience for me was serving as a caregiver to my husband and grappling through the challenges we faced in him trying to get healthcare that would hopefully save his life, and both of us grappling through finding the time to balance the jobs that we had to pay the bills and the time that both of us needed for him to get care and me to be there by his side.
And so I knew that I was going to have to go out of my way to reinforce for the media that I’m a multidimensional human being, but what I think I saw time and time again on the campaign trail was that for as much attention as the media focused on that one particular identity, my gender identity 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, questions that I answered and I think brought the conversation back to policies that I was fighting for and conversations that I think resulted in those people with earnest questions giving me their vote. But then more frequently in the few instances where my gender identity came up, it was people who were excited about sending a message to a vulnerable community here in Delaware and across the country that our democracy is big enough for them too.
They were excited about being part of breaking that lavender glass ceiling, and I think that that reality, that it almost never came up and when it did, it was essentially positive, that ran contrary to I think what a lot of political observers thought, what a lot of particularly cynical political observers thought about what I would be like as a candidate and what voters would be like in responding to a candidate like me. Their expectation was just so divorced from the reality. I think it reinforced for me what’s going to sound like a cliche, but is actually true, which is that voters care much more about which candidate’s going to deliver for them than they do what a candidate’s gender is. And when you go out on the doors, people are excited to find what they have in common with each other, including with a candidate. And that was the theme of the year-and-a-half campaign and it’s certainly been what I’ve seen since then as well.
Nir: So Sarah, let’s talk about that top priority that you focused on in the legislature. In particular, 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, which you were instrumental in passing. We’ve seen issues like this struggle in a number of blue states, in large part to business opposition. Why did you choose to focus on this issue in particular? I know you mentioned your husband’s health struggles. And how did you actually get it through the legislature and overcome the frequent knee-jerk opposition to this sort of thing?
McBride: Well, for me, the passion for paid family and medical leave stemmed from that formative experience in my life, that time as a caregiver to my late husband Andy.
Andy was diagnosed with cancer about a year and a half into our relationship. We were not married yet. When he was diagnosed at the age of 26, our world came crashing down. But we were lucky. We were lucky that Andy had access to health coverage that allowed him to get world-class care that would hopefully save his life. And we were both lucky to have access to flexibility with our jobs that allowed us to focus on the full-time jobs of trying to get Andy better without having to sacrifice our income. And through all of that, Andy was able to get a 12-hour surgery – he had oral cancer – a 12-hour surgery that left him having to relearn how to talk, how to eat, how to breathe.
I was able to be there by his side to not just walk him through recovery, but then through radiation and chemotherapy, to suction his tracheostomy tube, to tend to his wounds, and more than anything else, to just be there to love him. And then when he found out that the cancer was terminal, that flexibility we both had, him through paid leave policies, formal paid leave policies, me through the generosity and grace of my employer, allowed both of us to get married just a couple of days before he passed away. And up until Andy’s last breath, he considered himself lucky.
But at the end of the day, I think both of us, as someone is facing the abject terror of a serious and ultimately terminal illness, we don’t believe those things should be a matter of luck. They should be the law of the land. The ability to get potentially life-saving healthcare, the ability to get that care without having to lose your income and struggle to pay the rent or the mortgage, that shouldn’t be unique, that shouldn’t be reserved for just the privileged or wealthy few.
And so for me, it’s a deeply personal issue. Government can’t stop all loss or all pain, but we can make life a little bit easier for people when hard times hit. And so it was rooted in that experience, but it was also reinforced time and time again by the conversations I was having with voters on the doors and over the phones during the pandemic, which was the challenge they were facing as caregivers. Whether that’s the challenge of raising a child in the first few weeks in particular, whether that was the challenge of trying to get healthcare for yourself, the challenge of adults caring for aging parents or spouses caring for one another, time and time again, these challenges that caregivers were facing in our society and the fact that our safety net just was not there for them like it should be, that only further reinforced my passion and drive to get this done.
When I started my campaign and said I was going to campaign on this, that this was going to be my top priority, when I put forward a plan during the course of the campaign, there were people, including people in positions of power, who literally laughed in my face. There had never been a private sector paid leave bill in Delaware. It had not been in the political discourse as a priority. And Delaware had this legacy of being almost conservative, certainly moderate on economic issues. No one thought it was possible. And they said, “If it is, it’ll take a decade or more.”
So I got elected. I had a little bit of attention around my election and my swearing-in because of my identity. And I committed that every single time I was going to talk to the media about my identity, I was going to talk about paid leave. I was going to use that unique platform and that unique microphone to say, “This needs to be a priority. I’ve heard from voters that this is a priority. The support is there. Elected officials have to follow and deliver.”
We introduced the Healthy Delaware Families Act in May of 2021, and it didn’t take a decade. It didn’t take five years. Within a year, our governor was signing that bill into law. It required compromise. It required a lot of work. It required going out and saying, “I’m going to go to places that agree with me, and I’m going to go to a rural community’s Chamber of Commerce and stand there for an hour, two hours, three hours, and just get every question that they have and answer every single question they have.” Sort of guided by… I remember during the Affordable Care Act Barack Obama had that sort of public round table, where he just fielded every question and sort of defeated the opposition in that moment through attrition and just outlasted everyone and outworked everyone.
I knew that if I outworked everyone, and I think more deeply and profoundly, if I showed up everywhere and listened, sometimes incorporating feedback in order to get the votes necessary, but also just giving people the respect to say, “I might not agree with you and I might find your fear to be unfounded. I might not incorporate your feedback, but I’m going to show you the respect to listen to you and demonstrate that government isn’t making this decision because it’s ignorant to your concerns and fears. We’re making this decision after having heard you out,” at least instill in people’s sense of trust that they had that opportunity and that the decision came out with their ability to at least weigh in.
And I think through that, we were able to dampen the opposition, in some cases, gain the support of unlikely allies because there was a give-and-take. And we were able to get that bill over the finish line with the supermajorities in the legislature that our constitution required because it had a revenue source. And it is, without question, my proudest moment in the legislature. It took a lot of work, a lot of sweat and tears, but it was worth it because it’s going to do a lot of good. And there will be generations of Delawareans when they have a child, who when they face a serious illness or when their family member and loved one faces a serious illness, they’re finally going to have the breathing room that Andy and I had for themselves too.
Nir: So one thing we of course have to talk about is the incredible soaring hatred among conservatives toward the transgender community, and really any sort of activity that challenges gender norms in any way such as drag in the last few years. It has just climbed to new heights. It’s vicious. It’s slanderous. It frankly feels just completely crazy and terrifying to me, and I’m a cis person. I know that there is obviously no silver bullet for responding to these kinds of attacks, but I would love to hear from you, what do you think is the most effective way to really respond to and deal with these attacks and just navigate this world where, on the one hand, trans acceptance does seem to be growing, but so does hostility towards trans folks?
McBride: I’m just going to step back because I am a candidate, but I’m a person too, and I want to impart upon the people who are listening just how frightening this moment is for trans people. I am in my 30s, I am college educated. I have a ton of layers of privilege. I’m white. I’m college educated. I was born into a family that was able to provide me love and support, and yet I’m scared. I’m scared in a way that I have never really been, even more scared than I was in those early days after coming out when everything was new and I feared rejection in every sense of the word. It is scary. People need to understand viscerally that when we see this on the news, when we read about it online, it can feel abstract. But even for someone like me, it frightens me to my core.
And I’ll be honest that I was reluctant to do it, do this, because of how cruel and violent the rhetoric has become. But I ultimately felt a calling to do this, which I know feels like politicians say that and it feels like such BS. But I felt like at the end of the day I couldn’t let that hatred and that vitriol create a cap for the levels of civic participation that my community can achieve. And if we do that, then they win.
I think as we face these attacks, there are a whole host of things that I think are important to reinforce. The first is that these attacks are part of a political strategy. They are part of a longstanding right-wing reactionary strategy to divide and conquer, to find a scapegoat, to fearmonger around that scapegoat, and to distract people from what is actually making their life harder and more difficult and frankly more dangerous. And that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to distract from the fact that they have absolutely no policy agenda for workers and families in this country. They’re trying to distract from their policy failures. And they have, in this moment, chosen to focus on trans people.
But what I will say is that as dangerous as these bills are, as dangerous as these policies are, as dangerous as this rhetoric is, I do think that the prioritization of these policies ring really hollow for voters. It is appealing to a faction of an ever-shrinking Republican base, but it is divorced from what’s actually keeping people up at night. And I think we have to consistently reinforce that fact. We have to defend the trans community. We have to make clear that these policies are wrong and unconstitutional. We have to make clear the consequences of these policies for the young people that they’re targeting and we also have to make clear that this is a cynical political strategy, and that regardless of the money or passion that the right wing puts into this, it isn’t really resonating with voters. Michigan is a great example. In 2022, they tried to make it a referendum on these policies and it didn’t work.
As we continue to diversify the narrative of who trans people are, as we begin to fill that knowledge gap that makes it more difficult for some voters to find the empathy and compassion for trans people, as we reinforce that trans people are multidimensional human beings, as we see more trans people in our communities, in our workplaces, in our faith communities, and yes, and yes, in the halls of government doing great things on LGBTQ rights and on all of the issues that we’re facing as a society that will help to create the sort of emotional and intellectual foundation for voters to just totally reject this type of politics. And I will say one of the things that gives me hope in this moment is that it’s always been in our most significant challenges, that we take our biggest steps forward as a community, but also as a country. And I think what feels different right now than it did five, 10 years ago, is that we can’t quite see the light at the end of the tunnel. We don’t know that if we do X, Y, or Z, that things will work out. And that feels different than the last 10 years when it was sort of like maybe pre-Trump, I should say, that if we simply worked for it, change was inevitable.
But as I reflect on my community’s history, as I reflect on our country’s history, the reality is that that sense of inevitability is the exception in our history. That you look out, you look through previous generations, there was no reason for enslaved people in the 1850s to believe that an Emancipation Proclamation was on the way. There was no reason for children in factories in the 1890s to think that it would get better and safer. There was no reason for workers in bread lines in 1929 to think that help was on the way because they had never heard of a New Deal.
There was every reason to worry that the Voting Rights Act wouldn’t pass as John Lewis marched across that bridge in Selma. And there was no reason for patrons at the Stonewall Inn to think that within many of their lifetimes, they’d have the right to marry. And so for me, as I reflect on the fact that every previous generation, including of LGBTQ people, had every reason to believe that change wouldn’t come, and yet they persevered and they summoned their hope and they found that light. I remain hopeful that if we continue to work for it, if we continue to exist in these spaces and in these places, if we continue to persist, even though right now we can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, we’ll summon it and we’ll find it.
Beard: Now, so often we see this again and again, these attacks, these bills that are coming up, particularly in red states, they appear in the complete absence of trans voices. In most state legislatures and in Congress, there’s no trans members and Republicans are frankly not interested in hearing from the trans community. That’s not the purpose, that’s not what they’re there to do when they’re passing this anti-trans legislation. Now you’ll have an opportunity if you’re elected to Congress, to pretty instantly become one of the most prominent trans voices in the political sphere. How does that sort of feel as a potentially groundbreaking figure? And how do you anticipate this changing these debates in Congress if you’re there and you’re providing this voice of a trans person?
McBride: I think that that representation is a foundation, it’s not a destination. Having a trans member of Congress, just as having trans legislators—it doesn’t solve everything. It’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t stop every anti-LGBTQ bill. It doesn’t change every heart and every mind, but it is a necessary foundation because in the absence of an impacted community being at the table, it becomes exceptionally easy to go after them. And at the end of the day, it shouldn’t be easy. It shouldn’t be easy for these right-wing politicians to come after the trans community. And when they have to look someone in the eye, when they have to be in a space with them, when they have to answer our questions in a committee hearing, it doesn’t stop it always, but it does make it harder, and it should be hard. They should feel badly for what they are doing.
And while shame, this Republican Party is largely beyond shame, I do think that most of these people don’t actually believe in these types of policies. They’re just apathetic to the consequences. And because they see some kind of political gain, they’re going for it. But humans are still humans, elected officials are still human. And that discomfort creates just one more barrier to them pursuing these policies with the veracity—and ultimately, if they do, let my presence contrast with their prejudice, let that be a visual representation of the humanity behind these issues and the cruelty of their policies, and let their pettiness contrast with my desire to make progress on the issues that actually matter to the people that all of us are representing. And in doing that, in presenting that contrast, I think voters will also respond and it will help to change the culture and the narrative around these issues because of it.
And so 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. And for me, that extra responsibility I have felt that in previous jobs is a first, and I feel it very deeply. But I also know that the 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. 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.
Beard: Now, just before we wrap up, I want to sort of take this out of politics and elections for a second. When I was growing up in North Carolina in the nineties, I didn’t really have any gay role models, and we’ve seen that change tremendously over the past 25 years. We’ve been seeing some of that similar change around the trans community, and there are more and more openly transgender public figures now, including yourself. So what advice would you give to a young trans person or someone questioning their gender identity in the current atmosphere?
McBride: The first is that I have seen enough change over the last 10 years. Change that was so impossible to me as a kid, that it was almost incomprehensible to come away not recognizing that change is truly possible, that nothing is impossible, and the only things that are impossible are the things that we don’t try. The second thing I’d say is a lesson that I learned early in my career as I was facing a lot of direct hatred and bigotry and bullying, which is that everyone has an insecurity. Everyone has something that society has told them they should be ashamed of, that they should hide, that is worthy of being mocked and ridiculed.
And the thing about us, the thing about trans people, the thing about LGBTQ people, is we have taken that fact, we have taken that bit of ourselves, that society has told us we should hide and keep a secret, and we’ve not only accepted it, but we’ve walked forward from a place of pride in it oftentimes. And the bullies for whatever insecurity they have, with any insecurity they may have, they see that individual agency and conquering our fears and our insecurities, they see that power and they are jealous of it.
And so you should know that you are powerful. You are powerful just by being, and you carry that power with you from the safest of places to the scariest of places.
Nir: Well, we have been talking with Delaware state Senator Sarah McBride, who is running for her state’s at-large congressional seat that is going to be open next year. Senator, before we let you go, I need to ask you the most important question, which is, how can our listeners learn more about you and how can they get involved with your campaign?
McBride: Sure. So people who want to volunteer, who want to donate, who want to learn more, can visit sarahmcbride.com. They can also follow me on Facebook at Sarah McBride, Twitter, Sarah E. McBride, and Instagram, Sarah E. McBride. Definitely join on to our campaign. Keep up to date because there’ll be a lot of opportunities to get involved and help us not just make history, but make a difference.
Nir: Senator, thank you so much for joining us on “The Downballot.”
McBride: Thanks so much for having me.
Beard: That’s all from us this week. Thanks to Sarah McBride for joining us. “The Downballot” comes out every Thursday everywhere you’re listening to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing [email protected]. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcast and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Walter Einenkel, and editor, Trever Jones. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.
