Sarah McBride (D-DE) On The Struggles To Come

"The biggest challenge is going to be to summon the hope necessary to see the fight through. I think that one of the challenges that we have in this country right now, particularly for Democrats, is that, really since the 1960s, it has felt like if we simply work for it, if we vote for it, if we volunteer, if we share our stories, if we lift our voices, that we can then inevitably bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. 

"And we felt that, I think particularly, in 2008 and when we elected Barack Obama, and then Affordable Care Act passed, and marriage equality became a law of the land. It just felt like there was this sort of unfolding sense of great progress.

"It feels different right now. It doesn't feel like if we simply work for it and fight for it, that change will come, that things will work out. But think about all of the advocates and activists and citizens who lived through different chapters in our country's history. We have to recognize that that sense of inevitability with hard work that we felt 20 years ago, 30 years ago — that’s the exception in our country's history.

"Every single previous generation of Americans has been called to conquer odds much greater than the ones that we're facing right now. And they had every reason to believe that change would not come. Enslaved people in the 1850s had no reason to believe that an Emancipation Proclamation was on the horizon. Unemployed workers during the early days of the Great Depression had never heard of a New Deal. Patrons at the Stonewall Inn never knew of a country where they could live openly and authentically as themselves. And yet they persevered. They summoned their hope, they found that light, and ultimately, they changed the world."