Delaware makes history as Sarah McBride and Lisa Blunt Rochester take the oath in Washington

WASHINGTON — It's a historic day for Delaware in Washington.

Democrat Lisa Blunt Rochester will be sworn into the Senate Friday, becoming the first Black woman to represent the state in the chamber after four terms in the U.S. House.

Taking her seat in the House will be Sarah McBride, who will officially become the first transgender person to serve in Congress upon taking the oath. McBride served in the Delaware Senate before her barrier-breaking election to Congress as Delaware's sole representative in the House.

Both women have a long history of public service in the state and won elections after Sen. Tom Carper, a Democrat, opted not to seek reelection after more than 20 years in the Senate. Firsts in their own right, both Delawareans have reputations as pragmatic politicians who have worked across the aisle.

Blunt Rochester, 62, born in Philadelphia and raised in Wilmington, first ran for office in 2016, winning a crowded primary and becoming the state's first female and first Black member of Congress.

She's one of four Black women ever to be elected to the Senate and she will be one of two serving at the same time 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 elected official, as a state senator in Delaware, takes office as GOP opposition to transgender identity has escalated.

She was greeted at Capitol Hill for orientation in November by targeted attacks on her access to the women's bathrooms, led by U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., and enacted by Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.

McBride dismissed the attacks as a distraction and said she wasn't in Congress to "fight about bathrooms." She called the experience a "crash course in the dysfunction" and "performance art" of Congress.

In the state Senate, McBride was a primary sponsor of a 2022 bill that created the state's paid medical and family leave program. Her congressional campaign website laid out myriad progressive issues including increasing the federal minimum wage to $15, investing in renewable energy, banning assault weapons, legalizing cannabis, and guaranteeing paid sick time and paid medical and family leave. McBride also wants to expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing, lower its eligibility age and provide a public option.

Blunt Rochester's rise

Blunt Rochester replaces her mentor U.S. Sen. Tom Carper, who she interned for when he was a member of Congress, and she was a new mother, in the late 80s.

She eventually became the deputy secretary of the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services and was appointed Delaware's first female and first Black labor secretary in 1998. Later, she managed Delaware's workforce as state personnel director.

Blunt Rochester has repeatedly introduced the Clean Slate Act to seal the records of people with low-level drug offenses, including in 2023 with U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C. The bill was part of a Blunt Rochester's Jobs Agenda, which included seven bills she introduced to strengthen Delaware's workforce. One of those bills was the bipartisan Promoting Resilient Supply Chains Act, which passed the House in May. She touts working on a gun violence prevention bill as a co-sponsor that passed the House in 2022. And she was a primary sponsor of a bill to address scams targeting older adults that had versions pass both the House and Senate but did not ultimately become law.

She said in her campaign that she would fight efforts to privatize Medicare and Medicaid.

Blunt Rochester comes from a political family. Her father, Ted Blunt, was an educator and served on the Wilmington City Council for nearly 25 years, including as its president, and her family has been connected to President Joe Biden's for decades. One of her two sisters worked in Biden's Senate office, and the president campaigned alongside her father.

Biden tapped Blunt Rochester to cochair his campaign in 2020 and 2024 and she served on the committee that chose Kamala Harris to be his vice president.

Blunt Rochester has sought to turn her personal struggles into opportunities for change throughout her legislative career. She has worked to improve Black women's maternal health outcomes, created a bipartisan caucus for tech-focused workforce preparation, and wants to start what she calls "a menopause movement."

Blunt Rochester's husband, Charles Rochester, died unexpectedly from blood clots in 2014 and the personal loss has shaped her work, including her work to make health care more affordable.

For McBride, a career of firsts

McBride previously worked for former Delaware Gov. Jack Markell and the late Attorney General Beau Biden, the president's son who passed away in 2015. She is a former spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ advocacy organization.

In 2016, she was the first openly transgender person to speak at the Democratic National Convention.

McBride came out through her student newspaper as she wrapped up her term as study body president at American University in 2012. She revealed that she was transgender and about to come out in an internship application to The White House during the Obama administration, she told The Washington Post in 2015. She was the first openly transgender woman to intern at the White House.

"My hope was that in being there my presence was a reminder of the humanity of trans people, of the fact that there were 800,000 people living in this country that were impacted by the president's policies," she said in the 2015 interview with The Post.

Her late husband Andrew Cray, a transgender man, was an LGBTQ health advocate who was posthumously honored by the White House. Cray, who had cancer, died just four days after the couple got married in 2014. McBride said in her 2016 DNC speech that his passing reminded her that "every day matters when it comes to building a world where every person can live their life to the fullest."

She told the AP that Cray's death affirmed her religious faith and that she often seeks to follow his example of "principled grace" and compassion toward anti-LGBTQ politicians.

She enters Congress as Trump and his surrogates have frequently fixated on transgender people during his rallies and attacked them in ads, including one that featured an image of Assistant U.S. Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, the former Pennsylvania physician general and secretary of health and the first openly transgender person confirmed by the Senate to a federal position.

McBride said in a June interview that Trump and his allies' "obsession with trans people" is part of a "manufactured culture war" to serve as a distraction that gets through in the first place due to a "knowledge gap" about LGBTQ people.

Still, she's stressed that she can make unlikely allies. She said she has worked with Republicans whose views on LGBTQ rights trouble her but has found common ground on various issues like health-care access, disinformation, paid family leave, and gun safety legislation.

State Sen. Brian Pettyjohn, a Republican colleague of McBride's in the Delaware legislature, said that she would seek out input on legislation from conservative members, the AP reported.

"She's always one to come over, to make that effort to get outside that echo chamber and say, 'What can we do to polish it up some, to make it better?'" Pettyjohn said.