CNN
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Sarah McBride, a senator from Delaware, will win her state’s at-large U.S. House seat, making her the first transgender person to serve in Congress, CNN projects.

The at-large seat was vacated when retiring Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester chose to run for the open U.S. Senate seat.

Despite being in a reliably blue state, McBride emphasized that her work was a bipartisan effort to implement paid family and medical leave in the state. She also called for support from unions and efforts to raise the state’s minimum wage. While she didn’t rely on the historic nature of her run, she alluded to a broader theme of respect — specifically that everyone deserves a member of Congress who respects them and their families.

The incoming congressman is a close ally of President Joe Biden and is credited with helping shape Biden’s views on LGBTQ issues. McBride came into Biden’s orbit in 2006, when she worked for the late Beau Biden’s attorney general campaign. Beau Biden was also a strong supporter of the 2013 transgender protection legislation that McBride championed in Delaware.

The president wrote the foreword to McBride’s 2018 memoir, “Tomorrow Will Be Different.” The book details McBride’s experiences as a transgender rights activist and her personal story, including meeting her late husband Andrew Cray, whom she met at an LGBTQ pride event at the White House in 2012. Cray, a transgender man and fellow activist, died of cancer in 2012. 2014, just days after the two got married.

McBride, a former spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ rights group, has made history throughout her public life. In 2012, as president of the senior and student council at American University, she made national news when she announced that she was transgender in an op-ed in the school newspaper.

McBride wrote at the time about her concerns that her gender identity would not be compatible with her goals for running for office.

“I know now that my dreams and my identity are only mutually exclusive if I don’t try,” she wrote.

Four years later, McBride became the first transgender person to address a national party convention when she spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

And in 2020, McBride became the first transgender person elected to serve in a Senate, when she was chosen to represent a seat in northern Delaware.