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

WASHINGTON — It was a historic day for Delaware in Washington.

Democrat Lisa Blunt Rochester was 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 is Sarah McBride, who officially became 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.

As snow started to fall outside on Friday, Blunt Rochester thanked supporters at a reception at the Library of Congress, which she noted used to be located in the Capitol before the British burned it down during the War of 1812. She used the setting to speak about rising from the ashes, at a time when Democrats nationally are regrouping after losing the White House and the Senate.

“In this moment people feel excited, emboldened, scared, anxious, not sure what is on the horizon,” she said. “But I want you to know that no matter what, we will rise.”

Blunt Rochester is 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.

Dressed in an all-white suit — a color associated with the suffragette movement — Blunt Rochester said she was “elated” to be representing the state as its newest senator.

“I am truly proud, humble, honored, ready, that’s the word — ready,” she said.

Earlier in the day, Blunt Rochester met with former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D., Ill.), the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate, and Carla Hayden, the first Black woman to serve as the Librarian of Congress.

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.).

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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 a brief interview in her office where constituents and reporters filtered in and out continuously on Friday morning, McBride called joining the House “awe-inspiring.”

“To be heading to a floor where they passed the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, where women got the right to vote, it’s just beyond my wildest dreams,” she said.

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

Her long political career was reflected in the audience that greeted her Friday. Sens. Chris Coons (D., Del.), Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore all attended.

Schumer, the Senate minority leader, lauded Blunt Rochester as “one of the most effective” members of Congress and also “one of the most beloved.” He called her a “bright light,” after a difficult election.

“Being in the minority in the Senate where the minority has real power, sometimes it’s real fun and we’re going to have fun,” he told her. “We’re going to have fun in making sure we block the bad things they are trying to do.”

Moore said Blunt Rochester’s election sends a statement “to the ancestors … to our children.”

“She’s someone whose not just gonna make history by her swearing in but by the work she does on Capitol Hill,” Moore said.

Blunt Rochester is a former 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.

She has repeatedly introduced the Clean Slate Act to seal the records of people with low-level drug offenses, part of her jobs agenda. And she touts working on a gun violence prevention bill as a cosponsor that passed the House in 2022.

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

» READ MORE: U.S. Rep Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Philly native, is poised to be Delaware’s first Black female senator

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” to invest in research and raise awareness about the effects of the life stage.

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.

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McBride’s office walls are still bare, but the room was abuzz Friday morning as she met with a wide range of constituent groups, well-wishers, and reporters. She posed for a photo with a group of Turkish American constituents and offered everyone who came through food catered by Wawa.

McBride is the lone representative from Delaware, but already has close relationships with Pennsylvania Democratic Reps. Mary Gay Scanlon, Brendan Boyle and Madeleine Dean.

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.

“I’m used to working with people who I have significant disagreements with, including people who have voted against LGBTQ rights,” McBride said Friday. “The reality is, in a diverse, pluralistic democracy, we have to be able to have conversations across disagreement.”

McBride called the GOP focus on attacking transgender rights “grandstanding,” and an attempt to distract from her work.

“It’s going to be incumbent upon all of us to acknowledge the harm that these attacks have on the people they are attempting to target but also, just as importantly, to make clear that we won’t sit idly by while they employ the politics of misdirection, while they try to distract people with the tiny object of their obsession with trans rights, while at the same time picking the pocket of American workers.”

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 publicly through her student newspaper as she wrapped up her term as study body president at American University in 2012. She said 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.

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.