This is a historic day for the State of Delaware in Washington.
Democrat Lisa Blunt Rochester will be sworn into the Senate on Friday, becoming the first Black woman to represent the state in the chamber after four terms in the House.
Taking her place in the House will be Sarah McBride, who after taking the oath of office will officially become the first transgender person to serve in Congress. McBride served in the Delaware State Senate before breaking barriers in congressional elections as Delaware’s only representative in the House of Representatives.
Both women have long histories of serving in public office in the state and won election after Sen. Tom Carper, a Democrat, chose not to seek re-election after more than 20 years in the Senate. Both Delawareans, firsts in their own right, have reputations as pragmatic politicians who have worked on both sides of the aisle.
Blunt Rochester, 62, born in Philadelphia and raised in Wilmington, first ran for office in 2016, winning the primary with a vast crowd to become the state’s first woman and first Black member of Congress.
She is one of four Black women elected to the Senate and one of two to serve concurrently in the 119th Congress. Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat from Maryland, was also elected in November.
McBride, 34, who was already the nation’s highest-ranking openly transgender official as a Delaware state senator, takes office amid escalating GOP opposition to transgender identity.
In November, she was welcomed to Capitol Hill for orientation with targeted attacks on her access to women’s bathrooms, led by Republican U.S. Nancy Mace (R, South Carolina) and introduced by Speaker Mike Johnson (R, Los Angeles).
McBride dismissed the attacks as a distraction and stated that she was not in Congress for that “Argument about bathrooms” She called the experience a “crash course in dysfunction” and “performance art” for Congress.
In the state Senate, McBride was the lead sponsor of the 2022 bill that created the state’s paid medical and family leave program. Her congressional campaign website discusses countless progressive issues, including raising the federal minimum wage to $15, investing in renewable energy, banning assault weapons, legalizing cannabis and providing paid sick leave and paid medical and family leave. McBride also wants to expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing care, lower the age for benefits and provide a public option.
Blunt Rochester promoted
Blunt Rochester replaces her mentor, U.S. Sen. Tom Carper, for whom she interned when he was a member of Congress and she was a young mother in the late 1980s.
She eventually became deputy secretary of the Delaware Department of Health and Human Services, and in 1998, she was appointed the first woman and first black secretary of labor for the state of Delaware. She later managed Delaware’s workforce as director of state personnel.
Blunt Rochester has repeatedly introduced the Clean Slate Act to seal the records of people who commit minor drug crimes, including: in 2023 with U.S. Representative Nancy Mace (R., SC). The bill was part of Blunt Rochester’s bill Work agendawhich included seven bills she introduced to strengthen the workforce in Delaware. One of these bills was bipartisan Act promoting resilient supply chainswhich was passed by the House in May. She boasts that she is working as a co-sponsor on the Gun Violence Prevention Act passed Chambers in 2022. Was the main sponsor of a Bill to address anti-elderly scams, versions of which were passed in both the House and Senate but did not ultimately become law.
In her campaign, she said she would fight attempts to privatize Medicare and Medicaid.
Blunt Rochester comes from a political family. Her father, Ted Blunt, was an educator who served on the Wilmington City Council for nearly 25 years, including as its president, and her family has been involved with President Joe Biden for decades. One of her two sisters worked in Biden’s Senate office, and the president campaigned alongside her father.
Biden chose Blunt Rochester to co-chair his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, and she served on the committee that selected Kamala Harris as his vice president.
Blunt Rochester has strived throughout her legislative career to turn her personal struggles into opportunities for change. She worked to improve Black women’s maternal health situation, has formed a bipartisan caucus dedicated to tech-focused workforce preparation and wants to launch what she calls the “menopause movement.”
Blunt Rochester’s husband, Charles Rochester, died unexpectedly from blood clots in 2014 and personal loss has shaped her work, including her work to make health care more affordable.
A new career for McBride
McBride previously worked for former Delaware Gov. Jack Markell and Attorney General Beau Biden, the president’s son, who died in 2015. She is a former spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ advocacy organization.
In 2016 she was the first openly transgender person to speak out at the Democratic National Convention.
McBride came out through her student newspaper after finishing her term as research unit chair at American University in 2012. She revealed that she was transgender and would soon apply for an internship at the White House during the Obama administration. she told The Washington Post in 2015. She was first openly transgender woman for an internship at the White House.
“I hoped that my presence there was a reminder of the humanity of transgender people and that there are 800,000 people in this country who have been impacted by the president’s policies,” she added. – she said in a 2015 interview with the Post Office.
Her late husband, Andrew Cray, a transgender man, was and was an LGBTQ health advocate posthumously honored by the White House. Cray, who had been suffering from cancer, died just four days after the couple’s wedding in 2014. McBride said in her 2016 DNC speech that his passing reminded her that “every day matters when it comes to building the world, in which every person can live as expected.” most fully.”
She told the AP that Cray’s death confirmed her religious faith and that she often tries to emulate his example of “grace by principle” and compassion toward anti-LGBTQ politicians.
He is joining Congress because Trump and his surrogates have frequently focused on transgender people at their rallies and attacked them in ads, including an ad featuring a photo of U.S. Deputy Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, former Pennsylvania’s Surgeon General and Secretary of Health and the first openly transgender person confirmed by the Senate for a federal position.
McBride said in a June interview that Trump and his allies’ “obsession with transgender people” is part of a “manufactured culture war” to serve as a distraction that is seeping through primarily because of a “knowledge gap” about LGBTQ people.
Still, he emphasizes that he may gain unexpected allies. She said she has worked with Republicans whose views on LGBTQ rights concern her, but has found common ground on a variety of issues such as health care access, misinformation, paid family leave and gun safety laws.
State Sen. Brian Pettyjohn, McBride’s Republican colleague in the Delaware Legislature, said he would seek input on the legislation from conservative members, t– AP reported.
“She always comes in and tries to get out of that echo chamber and says, ‘What can we do to refine this a little bit, to make it better?’” Pettyjohn said.
