VA-06: She's Written Bestsellers About Appalachian Struggles. She's Running for Office. But Don't Compare Her to Vance.

[RandySF]

CLIFTON FORGE, Virginia — Beth Macy stood at a lectern in front of a little more than 50 people in the basement of the Historic Masonic Theatre in this small town some three and a half hours from Capitol Hill. She put her hands in her pockets and clasped them behind her back. She crossed her arms and looked down at her stapled printed pages.

“So,” she said, “you might know me …”

One need not be a citizen of the Appalachia-based 6th Congressional District of Virginia for that to be the case. For a certain class of book-reading American — the type with a taste for deeply reported stories about left-behind parts of the country — the woman running for this seat in the United States House is something of a household name. An award-winning reporter for the Roanoke Times for 25 years, she’s the author of five nonfiction books, including three of particular note: Factory Man, her critically acclaimed 2014 debut about globalization’s ravaging of Virginia’s furniture industry; Dopesick, a 2018 tome on America’s opioid crisis that turned into a Hulu series; and the recently released Paper Girl, a memoir about her own hardscrabble childhood and the plight of her fading Ohio hometown.

If she wins — a big if in a district that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1990 — Macy, 61, will be the second writer of at least one bestselling book about hard-hit Appalachia to get elected to federal office. The first, of course, is former Ohio senator and current vice president JD Vance. Macy and Vance both grew up in hollowed-out factory towns in families marked by trauma and drama and drinking or drug-doing. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy proved to be a political launching pad; Macy’s books could be, too.




https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/12/29/beth-macy-the-bestselling-author-of-dopesick-is-running-for-congress-is-she-the-liberal-jd-vance-00703039?nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nname=playbook&nrid=00000173-0d35-d4d9-afff-ef3520310000

[RandySF]

1. FYI, Beth Macy is a Democrat.

[Blue Full Moon]

2. Vance is a flatlander. Not Appalachian at all.

[riversedge]

3. "it's a piece of political terrain that's dependably elected a Republican for more than 30 years."

Saying she has a tall task is very polite .
But one never knows these days.



Macy is, she stressed here more than once, “not a politician” — a useful thing to be able to say in the maiden candidacy of any would-be politician. Turning her candidacy into an actual spot in Congress figures to be a tall task. In a district that shoots north from Roanoke to the Loudoun County line along Interstate 81 and the Appalachians, she’s pitted against two other Democrats in next June’s primary — the winner of which gets to go up against a four-term incumbent in the Trump-endorsed Ben Cline. Potential mid-decade, Democratic-led redistricting could rejigger the map, but as it stands it’s a piece of political terrain that’s dependably elected a Republican for more than 30 years.

Macy is positioned ideologically as a socially progressive economic populist — a kind of new-era New Dealer who lives in a semi-urban speck of blue surrounded by so many shades of suburban and rural red. Her fledgling platform to my ear stems straight from the sort of super-story she’s been stitching together in her books — a “crisis of opportunity,” as she calls it, the wreckage wrought in small towns and rural regions by the consequences of the .......................

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

[Aristus]

5. Appalachian struggles?

It's not a struggle. They consciously and deliberately vote for the people who are making their lives worse. I don't imagine they struggle at all over who they want to vote for.

And when they keep right on struggling in life, election cycle after election cycle after election cycle, they keep right on voting for the wrong candidates.

No more nose to cut off, I'm guessing.

Some struggle...

[fujiyamasan]

6. Yes, most of the damage they're facing is self inflicted

It’s not only the politics as you mentioned, but even in their personal lives (the reality is that many of them take no personal responsibility for their addiction to meth). I guess the smart ones simply leave.

[Buckeyeblue]

7. Correct. As a culture the pretty much have self-isolated from the rest of the country

And their politics are hard right. My guess is that the ones who recognize what's going on leave. But I don't think this is just an Appalachian problem. I think this a the same problem with much of rural America. They pretty much self-isolated. And up until the 70's this worked fine. The little towns were self-sufficient, little economies that worked well. But as the larger economies changed--and the older generation died--things started to change. The small towns became smaller. Kids went to college and never came back. This trend continued until the small town is nothing more than a place on a map. The people who live there either don't work or drive 20-30 minutes to their jobs. But everyone keeps voting Republican.