Beth Macy, author of Dopesick and a longtime reporter for the Roanoke Times, is running for Congress in Virginia's 6th district, a seat held by Republicans for over 33 years. Her campaign strategy involves canvassing the mountainous western part of the state, knocking on doors, visiting food pantries, and meeting with veterans—all while carrying her reporter's notebook to jot down stories from voters.
At a recent fundraiser, two couples whose land had been in their families for 300 years told Macy about a proposed data center on adjacent land. Macy records an introduction to camera—"Hey I'm Beth and I'm running for Congress"—and then shares their stories 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."
Challenge to Ben Cline
Macy has challenged Republican congressman Ben Cline, who won by nearly 30 points in 2024, to three debates ahead of November's vote. Cline agreed to three but then appeared to limit them to candidate forums. Macy told her former paper that amounted to "a chicken-you-know-what response."
The data center debate has complicated many races this cycle. Three hours north-east of Roanoke lies Loudoun County, the data processing heart of the US. But this is farm country, typically Republican, and farmers face high diesel prices, fertilizer costs, and 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."
Parallels with the opioid crisis
Democrats hope Macy can pull off an upset despite Virginia's state supreme court striking down a voter-approved redistricting plan that would have helped the party. The decision has energized Democrats locally, and with the political mood turning against incumbents—especially Republicans—Macy could succeed.
Macy draws a parallel between the opioid crisis and the data center issue. In the first, the public was told OxyContin was not addictive, only to find it was. In the second, data centers may be foisted on the public without sufficient knowledge of their consequences for water and electricity supplies. "It's the idea that this thing was done to people without their knowledge," Macy says, pointing to a multi-building data center campus on a 312-acre site in Botetourt County. "Only relatively recently did the people of Botetourt even find out they were doing it." She compares it to Purdue Pharma: "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 water requirements of the Botetourt data center, codenamed "Project Raspberry," came to light after Henri Gendreau, founder of the Virginia-based publication the Roanoke Rambler, filed a public records request under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
Political platform
Macy, 62, has published five books: Factory Man, Truevine, Dopesick (later a Hulu series), Raising Lazarus, and last year's Paper Girl, a memoir about her Ohio childhood. The books have drawn comparisons to JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, which Macy rejects: "Oh my God, 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 receiving a Pell Grant to attend Bowling Green State University, Hollins University, and a journalism fellowship at Harvard. "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," she contends.
Running as a Democrat in rural Virginia means addressing Biden administration policy shortcomings. Macy acknowledges Democrats "screwed up the border" last time. "It was wide open and they sent Kamala [Harris] down there, or she was supposed to," she said. She mentions Nafta under Bill Clinton and the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and calls for a solid H-2A program for temporary agricultural jobs. "I've done a lot of solid reporting on tobacco workers who would love to go home once a year."
Macy's platform includes recognizing that white-collar jobs filled by indebted college graduates may disappear with AI, while 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."
She 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.
At a fundraiser on a horse ranch, Macy said she believes Virginia voters 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."
