Virginia’s sixth congressional district has been in Republican hands for over 33 years, but Beth Macy, a longtime reporter with the Roanoke Times and author of Dopesick, a powerful account of the opioid crisis that swept through Appalachia two decades ago, has a plan to change that.
The plan, drawing on her experience as a reporter, is to canvass the district in the mountainous west of the state, knocking on doors, going to food pantries, meeting with veterans. It’s what any political hopeful might do, but with a twist: Macy carries her reporter’s notebook and jots down the good stories she’s been told.
One came at a recent fundraiser: two couples whose land had been in the family for 300 years approached Macy to tell her that a datacenter had been proposed on land next door. Macy does an intro to camera: “Hey I’m Beth and I’m running for Congress.” Then they tell their stories that then get posted on social media.
“It’s been really effective because it show the real issues that people care about and people who are independent or moderate Republican who are maybe changing their mind and starting to cross over …” she says. “If it’s enough, I don’t know.”
Macy has challenged Republican congressman Ben Cline, who was elected by nearly 30 points in 2024, to three debates ahead of November’s vote. Cline agreed to participate in three, but then appeared to limit them to something less – candidate forums. Macy told her former paper that amounted to “a chicken-you-know-what response”.
Many races in this cycle have been upended or at least complicated by the datacenter debate. Three hours to the north-east of Roanoke lies Loudon county, the data processing heart of the US. But this is farm county, typically Republican, and farmers are being buffeted by high diesel prices and fertilizer costs as well as the loss of immigrant workers. A sign on a country road to Glasgow, 30 miles north of Roanoke, read: “Farmers for Beth Macy: Protect Family Farms, Stop Data Centers.”
Democrats hope Macy can pull of an upset win despite Virginia’s state supreme court striking down a voter-approved re-districting plan that would have helped the party. The decision has energized Democrats locally and with the political mood across the US turning against incumbents – but especially Republicans – Macy could pull it off.
In Macy’s view, there is a more than a notional parallel between the opioid crisis and the data center issue. In the first, the public were told Oxycontin prescribed for pain relief was not addictive, only to find it was. In the second, data centers may be being foisted on the public without sufficient knowledge of their consequences to water and electricity supplies.
“It’s the idea that this thing was done to people without their knowledge,” Macy says, pointing to the construction of a multi-building data center campus on a 312-acre site in Botetourt county, Virginia. “Only relatively recently did the people of Botetourt even find out they were doing it.
“It’s just like when Purdue Pharma told doctors and conned congressmen with nice checks that their drug wasn’t addictive. It’s the same thing … they occluded the fact of the matter and how people were going to be hurt.”
The opioid crisis, she points out, remained hidden from view for years because of the shame that addicts and their families carry, but the data center issue now blowing up in the faces of politicians from both political parties has changed the narrative.
The amount of water that the Botetourt data center, codenamed “Project Raspberry”, would require only came to light after Henri Gendreau, founder of the Virginia-based news publication the Roanoke Rambler filed a public records request under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA).
Macy, 62, has published five books: Factory Man, about a furniture factory owner in rural Virginia: Truevine, about two Black brothers who were kidnapped and forced to perform in circus freak shows during the Jim Crow era; Dopesick, which later became a Hulu series; Raising Lazarus about the opioid crisis aftermath; and, last year, Paper Girl, a memoir about her Ohio childhood and the seeds of rising political division.
That has brought a natural – though to her unwelcome – comparisons to Donald Trump’s vice-president JD Vance, whose 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy traced his upbringing and his mother’s heroin addiction in Ohio and became a launch pad for his political career.
“Oh my God,” Macy exclaims, “I hate that comparison. I’m my own person, I’m not JD Vance. I’m 20 years older than he is. It’s not the exact same part of Ohio. He grew up with addiction and poverty. Okay, I’ll take that. Tough grandma, I’ll take that. But he mocked poor people for being poor and said it was a lack of masculinity and a lack of thrift. I would never blame poor people for their poverty.”
In Paper Girl, Macy describes how she received a Pell Grant to go to Bowling Green state university, Hollins university and a fellowship in journalism at Harvard, much as Vance received a grant under the GI Bill to attend Ohio State and later a scholarship to attend Yale.
“What I’ve tried to do is amplify the voices of people like me who don’t grow up with everything handed to them. He got out of that, went to Yale, became a venture capitalist, a senator and now the vice president, and now wants to yank up the ladder behind him,” Macy contends.
Running as a Democrat in rural Virginia is of course very different from running under the same banner in a naturally blue or toss-up purple district.
One of the hurdles a Democrat candidate running in a red district must address is the shortcomings of Biden administration policies. Macy acknowledges that Democrats the last time screwed up the border. “It was wide open and they sent Kamala [Harris] down there, or she was supposed to,” she said.
Democrats, she says, have to talk about what they got wrong. She mentions the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) under Bill Clinton and the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that immunized websites and social media networks from responsibility for what is posted online.
“We’ve got to talk about that stuff,” she says. “and we haven’t renewed immigration since 1996. We’ve got to have a solid H-2A program (for temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs) for folks. I’ve done a lot of solid reporting on tobacco workers who would love to go home once a year.”
One aspect of Macy’s platform is to recognize that white-collar jobs filled typically by indebted college graduates are likely to disappear with AI, while the market for blue-collar or trades jobs will increase.
“I think the trades are going to become highly coveted and you’re going to see people who might have gone to college or come from wealthier families go after the trade jobs. So I’m calling for free community college, and I think Google or all these data center companies should be paying for that.”
Macy has called for a moratorium on data centers until “some kind” of AI czar can be found “to protect our jobs, our land, our electricity, our water, because it’s moving so fast now it’s endangering all of us.” Macy recently received an endorsement from the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US.
She may be slowly opening the door in Virginia that has been closed to a Democrat for decades. At a fundraiser on a horse ranch – a largely favorable crowd – Macy says she believes Virginia voters who might have been resistant are loosening up.
“They’re feeling the pain and they’re getting to know me a little bit ... I know what it’s like to worry that the electricity is going to get cut off, or might go hungry and eat government cheese, or my grandmother accepting food stamps.”
