Beth Macy, Dopesick author, challenges Cline in Virginia's 6th District race

Macy rejects Vance parallel, draws opioid-data center comparison

Macy, who spent years chronicling the opioid epidemic at the Roanoke Times and has published five books — Factory Man, Truevine, Dopesick, Raising Lazarus and the 2025 memoir Paper Girl — is canvassing Virginia’s mountainous 6th District with a reporter’s notebook alongside her campaign materials. Dopesick was later adapted into a Hulu series.

At a recent fundraiser, two couples whose family land had been held for 300 years approached Macy about a proposed data center next door, according to a Guardian account of the campaign. Macy records conversations on video and posts them on social media after introductions. “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,” Macy said. “If it’s enough, I don’t know.”

The data center issue has gained traction across the district. A sign on a country road to Glasgow, 30 miles north of Roanoke, read “Farmers for Beth Macy: Protect Family Farms, Stop Data Centers.” 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, according to the Guardian. The project is planned as a multi-building campus on a 312-acre site in Botetourt County.

Macy draws a parallel between the data center controversy and the opioid crisis, framing both as cases where the public learned about harms only after the fact. “It’s the idea that this thing was done to people without their knowledge,” she said of the Botetourt project. “Only relatively recently did the people of Botetourt even find out they were doing it.” She added: “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.” She compared the data center controversy’s emergence to the years the opioid crisis “remained hidden from view” because of the shame carried by addicts and their families.

Macy challenged Cline, who was elected by nearly 30 points in 2024, to three debates ahead of November’s vote. Cline “appeared to limit them to something less — candidate forums,” according to the account. Macy called that response “a chicken-you-know-what response” in remarks to her former paper.

The campaign has drawn comparisons between Macy and Vance, the Ohio-born author of the 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy who went on to attend Yale, work as a venture capitalist, serve as a U.S. senator and become vice president. In Paper Girl, Macy describes how she received a Pell Grant to attend 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.

Macy has rejected the parallel. “Oh my God,” she said. “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.”

“What I’ve tried to do is amplify the voices of people like me who don’t grow up with everything handed to them,” Macy said. “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.”

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. Democrats are hoping Macy can pull off an upset despite Virginia’s state supreme court striking down a voter-approved redistricting plan that would have aided 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, according to the Guardian. District farmers face high diesel prices and fertilizer costs alongside the loss of immigrant workers.

According to The Guardian, Macy has acknowledged 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. She pointed to the North American Free Trade Agreement under President Bill Clinton and the Communications Decency Act of 1996 as Democratic-supported measures that warrant renewed attention. “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.”

Macy has argued that white-collar jobs typically filled by indebted college graduates will contract as AI expands, while blue-collar and trades jobs will grow more valuable. “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,” she said. “So I’m calling for free community college, and I think Google or all these data center companies should be paying for that.”

She has called for a moratorium on data center construction 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.” The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the United States, recently endorsed her campaign.

At a fundraiser on a horse ranch, Macy told a largely favorable crowd that 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,” she said. “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.”