President Biden called Delaware Sen. Sarah McBride (Democrat) on Wednesday to congratulate her on her victory in the primary for Delaware's only House seat, making her virtually certain to be the first transgender person elected to Congress in November.
“I called her and said, 'Sarah,' and I said, 'Beau is looking down from heaven and blessing you,'” Biden said. He told the Washington Blade In the interview published Friday, McBride was referring to the late Biden's son, Beau Biden, who served as Delaware's attorney general for nearly a decade and remained friends with McBride until his death from brain cancer in 2015.
“My heart was filled with love and joy, not only to hear from the president directly, but also through him and to think about what this moment means to my friend Beau, who I think about every day,” McBride said in a phone interview Friday afternoon.
“While campaigning, I often ask myself, 'What would Beau do?' And the answer is always right,” she said.
McBride, 33, first met Biden, whom she called her “political idol” in her 2018 memoir, as a star-struck 11-year-old in a Delaware restaurant. “Remember me when I'm president,” Biden, then a senator from Delaware, scribbled to McBride on a piece of paper ripped from a planner.
McBride isn't sure if she still has the note — it once hung in her childhood bedroom next to her Little League trophies. “My mom has a habit of throwing things away,” she says. But she still remembers how she felt that day, and what Biden's call on Wednesday meant to her younger self.
“When I think back to that moment, I think of everything that's happened in our lives. I don't think I could have ever imagined that our lives would become so intertwined in that moment when I first met someone that I'd looked up to since I was a child,” she said.
McBride later became close to Beau Biden as a teenager, working on his first run for state attorney general in 2006 and his reelection campaign in 2010. When she came out as transgender in 2012 while a student at American University in Washington, Beau Biden was one of the first people she called.
“I'm here with you, Harry, and I want you to know that we love you, we stand with you, and you're always a part of the Biden family. This doesn't change anything,” he said, McBride recalled in her memoir, “Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Transgender Equality.” In the book's foreword, President Biden described McBride as a born leader with “integrity and heart.”
McBride was the first transgender woman to serve as an intern at the White House during the Obama-Biden administration in 2012. In 2013, while serving on the board of Equality Delaware, a state LGBTQ rights group, McBride worked with Beau Biden and then-Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D), to advocate for stronger anti-discrimination laws against transgender people in the state.
McBride's relationship with President Biden then grew closer with the deaths of her husband, LGBTQ rights activist Andrew Clay, in 2014 and Beau Biden's the following year.
“Beau was definitely not only the foundation of our ongoing friendship, but also how the president and I got to know each other on a deeper level,” McBride said. “The president has been a big presence in my life, ever since I was a little girl in Delaware, but I think he got to know me on a deeper level through Beau's eyes, and I got to know the president on a deeper level through him.”
McBride won Delaware's statewide Democratic primary on Wednesday with more than 79% of the vote, according to Decision Desk HQ. He will face Republican John Whalen in November for the seat that has been held by Democrats since 2010.
