President Biden on Wednesday called Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride (D) to congratulate her on her primary win for the state’s only House seat, a victory that all but guarantees McBride will be the first openly transgender person elected to Congress in November.
“I called her, and I said, ‘Sarah,’ I said, ‘Beau’s looking down from heaven, congratulating you,'” Biden told the Washington Blade in an interview published Friday, referring to his late son Beau Biden, who served as Delaware’s attorney general for nearly a decade and with whom McBride maintained a friendship until his death from brain cancer in 2015.
“It just filled my heart with so much love and joy to not only hear from the president, but through him, to think about what this moment would have meant for my friend Beau, who I think about every single day,” McBride said during a Friday afternoon phone call.
“When I’m on the campaign trail, I often ask myself, ‘What would Beau do,’ and the answer is always right,” she said.
McBride, 33, first met President Biden, whom she called her “political idol” in her 2018 memoir, as a starstruck 11-year-old at a restaurant in Delaware. “Remember me when you are president,” a then-Sen. Biden (D-Del.) scribbled to McBride on a paper torn from his schedule book.
McBride isn’t sure whether she still has the note, which once hung in her childhood bedroom, next to her Little League trophies — “My mother is a chronic thrower-away of things,” she said — but McBride still remembers how she felt that day, and what President Biden’s Wednesday phone call would have meant to her younger self.
“As I reflect on that moment, I think about all that’s happened in our lives; I think about how I never would have guessed at that moment when I first met someone who I already was looking up to as a kid, how much our lives would intertwine,” she said.
McBride later grew close with the Bidens as a teenager while working on Beau Biden’s first bid for state attorney general in 2006 and his 2010 reelection campaign. When she came out publicly as transgender in 2012, as a student at American University in Washington, Beau Biden was among the first to call.
“I’m here with Hallie and we just want you to know that we love you, we stand with you, and you are still as much a part of the Biden family as ever. This doesn’t change anything,” he said, McBride recalled in her memoir, “Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality.” President Biden wrote the book’s forward, describing McBride as “honest and heartfelt” and a natural leader.
McBride interned at the White House under the Obama-Biden administration in 2012, becoming the first transgender woman to do so. In 2013, while on the board of directors for Equality Delaware, a state LGBTQ rights group, McBride worked with Beau Biden and then-Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) to advocate for stronger nondiscrimination protections for transgender people in the state.
Later, McBride and President Biden would grow closer following the loss of McBride’s husband, the LGBTQ rights advocate Andrew Cray, in 2014 and Beau Biden’s death the following year.
“Beau is definitely not only the foundation of our ongoing friendship, but really was the starting point of both the president and me getting to know one another in a deeper way,” McBride said. “The president has been a towering figure in Delaware for the entirety of my life — my very young life — but I think he got to know me more fully through the eyes of Beau, and I got to know him.”
McBride won the Democratic primary for Delaware’s at-large congressional district Wednesday with more than 79 percent of the vote, according to Decision Desk HQ. She will face off against Republican John Whalen in November for the seat, which Democrats have controlled since 2010.