CLIFTON FORGE, Va. — Veterans flock to a law office in this old railroad town for help wrestling with the Feds over health care. Across the mountains in Waynesboro, families who can’t afford groceries spend hours waiting outside the food pantry. Up in Monterey, the town economic development director works for free because budgets are thin.
Beth Macy writes it all down, still chasing stories across Appalachia after 40 years as a newspaper reporter and author of books including “Dopesick,” an exposé about Big Pharma’s contributions to the opioid crisis that became an Emmy-winning Hulu miniseries.
After the memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” catapulted JD Vance to prominence as an authentic child of the Rust Belt and Appalachia, Macy is leaning on her own roots and her writing about the region to jump into politics. But her long-shot bid for a House seat as a Democrat in a bright red Virginia district positions her as a kind of anti-Vance.
In an essay in the New York Times shortly before Vance was elected vice president, Macy faulted him for fearmongering about immigrants and turning his back on the public institutions that helped him escape poverty.
“I’m coming at it from the perspective of an old-school mountain Democrat,” Macy said in a recent interview. “Let’s make it safe, let’s protect working people.”
The two writers hail from Ohio hometowns only 60 miles apart: Middletown for Vance and Urbana for Macy. Both are the product of dysfunctional families and economic hardship. But Vance went on to the Ivy League and venture capital, urging the downtrodden to take personal responsibility for their prospects in life.
Macy, 62, published her own life story last year in “Paper Girl,” which examines the same terrain as “Hillbilly Elegy” but comes to very different conclusions.
Macy, who put down roots in Appalachia and spent decades writing about the region’s struggles for Virginia’s Roanoke Times newspaper, believes Vance blames poor people for their own plight. She sees outside forces working against the region going back generations, including the opioid makers who falsely claimed that their drugs were not addictive, and government policies driving the offshoring of manufacturing jobs.
Campaigning with pad and pen in hand, Macy says she aims to “connect pain to policy,” and she criticizes both major parties for a system that fails those in need. The message was warmly received on a recent campaign swing, and many voters were thrilled to meet Macy, who made sure the “Dopesick” show was filmed partly in the district.
But after years of division stoked by culture wars, folks who came out to see Macy the celebrity are not sold on casting a ballot for someone with a D after her name.
“Exactly the issue she has to overcome here — and I’m not sure how — is that an awful lot of people vote by just the R or the D, as simple as that,” said Robin Sullenberger, who spent two decades as a supervisor in Highland County and stopped by a recent Macy campaign appearance in Monterey. The supervisor jobs are nonpartisan, but Highland County — Virginia’s least populous county — has picked a Republican for president in every election since Alf Landon in 1936.
Macy is running against Republican incumbent Ben Cline in Virginia’s bright-red 6th District, a New Jersey-sized stretch of mountains and valleys that stretches from Winchester in the north to Roanoke in the south.
The nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report rates the district as “Solid Republican.” Cline, seeking his fifth term, beat his 2024 Democratic challenger by 28 percentage points and outperformed Donald Trump, who won by 24 points.
“I know that her liberal positions on the issues appeal to some sections of the Democrat base, but to compare her to JD is to suggest that her message may sell here,” Cline said in an interview. “It’s not selling here in the Shenandoah Valley, in the Roanoke Valley. There are common-sense conservative values here.”
Macy is navigating a tricky path within her party. She repudiates the recent rise of democratic socialists and also blames establishment lions such as President Bill Clinton for the NAFTA trade deal that she says wrecked the region’s economy.
She depicts her campaign as focused on practical solutions: addressing the “immigration disaster” through humane treatment and clear paths to citizenship; providing affordable health care through Medicare-for-all; aiding farmers by ending tariffs; taxing billionaires.
Macy has raised more money than Cline as of July 15, at $1.7 million compared with his $1.4 million, according to analysis by the nonpartisan campaign finance site Virginia Public Access Project. Almost all of her donations have come from individuals, while Cline has received more than $400,000 from GOP political action committees, according to VPAP.
Macy didn’t get involved in politics until last year, when friends in Roanoke — the blue-leaning city in Southwest Virginia where she lives with her husband — convinced her she had the name recognition to challenge Cline.
At the time, Macy was fine-tuning the manuscript of “Paper Girl,” which is part memoir and part hard-eyed examination of what’s become of her hometown. Macy grew up poor with an alcoholic father and a mother who took any job to provide for the family. Community support helped them get by, and federal Pell grants enabled Macy to go to college and pursue a career in journalism.
Returning to Urbana, Macy wrote about finding a town hollowed out by poverty and drug addiction. The sense of community, she says, has been replaced by a divisive strain of Christian nationalism and MAGA-fueled anger toward anyone seen as an outsider. A place once proud of its heritage helping enslaved African Americans seek freedom on the Underground Railroad is now peppered with Confederate flags.
A central figure in the book is a transgender young man struggling to get by in the community. Macy is deeply sympathetic to LGBTQ+ people because one of her two grown children is in a same-sex marriage and the other is nonbinary.
An editor pushed her to end the book with a strong statement about political solutions. “Basically, elect better people to office, people who will do the most good for the most people,” Macy said. “I didn’t think it would be me.”
Campaigning still feels odd to a journalist who spent years striving to be nonpartisan. She habitually takes notes, asking everyone she meets for their phone number and the spelling of their name. If she fills up a notebook, she’ll bum another from anyone nearby.
Macy says stories are the heart of her campaign: her own family member who died young after refusing two organ transplants because the donors had received the coronavirus vaccine. The farmer who can’t afford diesel fuel for his tractor because of the war in Iran. The sheriff who can’t get emergency calls because his mountainous county has only one cell tower.
And, everywhere, the families who have lost loved ones to painkillers that were promoted as safe.
“I don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat or moderate. We’re people. We’re Americans,” Macy told a group of Democrats at a fundraiser outside Harrisonburg — like other college towns, a blue island in the district. Her message was simultaneously that President Donald Trump’s policies are making problems worse and that people can fix them by overcoming political divisions.
“We’re not going to win this thing,” she said, “without meeting people in the middle.” She claimed incremental success, but for offbeat reasons. One business owner told Macy he’d vote for her because he didn’t like the way Trump disrespected Rob Reiner after his tragic death, she said; another Republican was going to switch after seeing Trump post an image of himself as Jesus that appeared to be AI-generated.
“I’ll take it,” Macy said.
In Clifton Forge, where the exteriors were shot for “Dopesick” several years ago and where actor Michael Keaton was seen in local restaurants, the economy has struggled for decades since the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad shifted jobs elsewhere.
Kristen McConnell sees desperation every day in her law practice focusing on veteran health care and disability issues. Solving problems is harder, she said, because of politics.
“Everybody wants health care, everybody wants child care, everybody wants a livable wage,” McConnell said, but if a Democrat talks about those subjects, it is viewed as socialism.
“People don’t understand that these things they use every day are the things that they’re railing against,” she said.
On a sizzling Friday at the end of July, Macy greeted people at a monthly downtown festival, as booths along the closed-off streets sold baked goods, homemade jewelry, hot dogs and barbecue.
John and Charlotte Waugh from nearby Covington set up folding chairs with a good view of the Bart Chucker Band, a local favorite alt-country group. John Waugh, 65, retired from a manufacturing job, is a big fan of Trump. Charlotte, 64, a retired educator, is not.
John has read some of Macy’s work, he said, and thinks she’s right on the money in diagnosing the region’s problems. But while his wife plans to vote for her, he will not.
“It’s more not just her — it’s the whole Democratic Party,” he said, saying that Democrats want boys to play girls’ sports. “I got granddaughters.”
Up the street at her consignment shop, Jennifer Oeltjen, 75, stayed open late to take advantage of the happy festival crowd. She was thrilled when “Dopesick” was filming there. The crew bought clothes from her for costumes, she said, and she remembers watching a night shoot when black-clad production assistants scurried around like ninjas.
A longtime Republican, Oeltjen worries that people nowadays expect too much help from the government. While she does not approve of the way Trump talks, she said the Democrats she sees on Fox News spend too much time battling him. She also cannot square pro-transgender policies with her religion.
Oeltjen has read Macy’s work and watched her speak to local groups. “She’s a good person,” Oeltjen said. “If I were going to vote for a Democrat, it would be Beth.”
But that’s not likely, she said, even though she knows very little about Cline. She intends to vote Republican this fall.
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