Better Win a District: Virginia’s Sixth

Beth Macy, the Democratic nominee to flip Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District, might have national name recognition, but her career is deeply rooted in the Appalachian communities she’s running to represent. A former reporter for the Roanoke Times, her 2018 book Dopesick chronicles the emergence of the opioid crisis and the path of destruction cut through communities like those in western Virginia. 

Virginia’s Sixth District runs north-south along the majority of Virginia’s border with West Virginia and is significantly defined by the Shenandoah Valley. But Chris Graham of the Augusta Free Press warned me that we shouldn’t reduce the district to a farming caricature. He told me that Virginia’s Sixth is “not nearly as rural as people on the outside think. There are urban-suburban hubs with solid D voter bases that can be energized. The Sixth is an opportunity for Democrats.” In addition to Roanoke, it is marked by towns like Harrisonburg, home to James Madison University and Eastern Mennonite University, and Winchester, the hometown of Patsy Cline.

If Macy were to flip the district, it would mark just the second change in representative in over thirty years. The last change came in 2018, when twenty-six-year incumbent Republican Bob Goodlatte retired. Another Republican, Ben Cline, successfully ran to fill the seat and has held it ever since. The district went just over sixty percent for Trump in 2024, and just shy of sixty percent for Winsome Earle-Sears in her 2025 gubernatorial bid against Abigail Spanberger. Congressman Cline has regularly won here by over twenty points. This is a ruby red place. 

So why am I bothering to write about it here in this series? Well, for one, my mother grew up in Appalachia in East Tennessee. I myself grew up at the foothills of the Ozarks in Arkansas. I know and love the kinds of communities described by Macy and other reporters like her. I am, proudly, a fractional hillbilly. And we are never going to see the long-term retreat of Trumpism or reverse the fascist turn in the Republican Party if we cannot make inroads in the places where support has traditionally been high. And Macy has been out-raising Cline all race, increasing her financial lead in the final stretch of the election. As my friend and Virginian Rob Tracinski told me, “if this district flips, that’s a sign of apocalypse for Republicans.”

On the campaign trail, Macy has leveraged anger at fuel prices and data centers, common themes across America’s conservative rural areas where anger at Republicans is spiking. She recently told The Guardian that she sees similarities in the data center fight and the opioid crisis: “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.”

Macy’s reporting on the opioid crisis is especially important here. Dopesick, which has also been turned into an excellent limited series on Hulu, focuses heavily on the Appalachian towns ravaged by OxyContin and related heroin abuse. In the book she notes how the problem took root in rural working-class towns—mining communities in Virginia and West Virginia and logging centers in Maine—before exploding into a national disaster:

When a new drug sweeps the country, it historically starts in the big cities and gradually spreads to the hinterlands, as in the cases of cocaine and crack. But the opioid epidemic began in exactly the opposite manner, grabbing a toehold in isolated Appalachia, Midwestern rust belt counties, and rural Maine. Working-class families who were traditionally dependent on jobs in high-risk industries to pay their bills—coal mining in southwest Virginia, steelmilling in western Pennsylvania, logging in Maine—weren't just the first to experience the epidemic of drug overdose; they also happened to live in politically unimportant places, hollows and towns and fishing villages where the treatment options were likely to be hours from home. […]

From there, the scourge not only advanced into new territories but also arrived via a different delivery system, as the morphine molecule shifted from OxyContin and other painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet to heroin, the pills' illicit twin, and, later, even stronger synthetic analogs.

As the epidemic gained strength, it sent out new geographic shoots, moving from predominantly rural areas to urban and suburban set-tings, though the pattern was never stable or fixed. Heroin landed in the suburbs and cookie-cutter subdivisions near my home in Roanoke in the mid-2000s.

I quote Macy at length here to paint a picture of the depth of her connection to the region and the pain it has sustained in the last thirty years. I also do it to highlight why Macy, who was also born in Ohio, recoils at comparisons to JD Vance, telling The Guardian: “I hate that comparison…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.”

As for their current suffering, Tracinski told me that “Trump's policies are almost designed to inflict maximum pain on these areas where his own voters live.” Many of the deep red rural communities that vaulted Trump back to the presidency are particularly vulnerable in his trade war with Canada. Writing at Cardinal News, founding editor Dwayne Yancey warned in April of 2025:

The parts of Virginia at most risk in a trade war with Canada are west of the Blue Ridge, specifically the 6th and 9th Congressional Districts, the two most Republican districts in the state, currently represented by Ben Cline and Morgan Griffith. Between them, those two districts have nearly 10,000 jobs and nearly $1.8 billion of goods tied to exports to Canada, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data. If you factor in services that companies in those districts are selling north of the border, then the trade value rises to $2.69 billion in total Canadian exports from the western part of Virginia.

Macy’s career makes her a more high-profile challenger than Democrats have mounted in the district for some time. But that’s not a guarantee of success. As Tracinski, a writer and commentator who lost in this year’s Democratic primary in Virginia’s Fifth District, said to me, “much as I would like to think being a writer and a media person helps you out, I found this to be very limited. Not a lot of voters read the paper regularly and know who you are—certainly not as many as those who watched 'The Apprentice.'”

What matters most is that voters in a historically politically stable region feel increasingly left behind in a way to an extent that an effective center-left candidate like Macy can seize on it. Here’s how Chris Graham put it to me: 

When the rest of the state was electing and re-electing Democrats to run the state, our folks were electing Republicans whose roots were more to the Party of Lincoln than to today's Party of Trump. Democrats erred in the 1990s when they gave up on us. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine are the two who have continued to invest campaign resources in our part of the state, but, for example, Terry McAuliffe almost completely ceded Western Virginia to Glenn Youngkin, who was able to run up huge margins out here as a result. There is a base of voters here who have voted Republican because they've been given no alternative. Their lives aren't better because of Trump tariffs, the war in Iran pushing gas and diesel prices higher, because rural health clinics are closing due to the Big Beautiful Bill. Beth Macy, running hard, at least gives those folks somebody to consider.

If Macy pulls off the massive upset of flipping the Virginia Sixth, it will be because of her networks in the region and, perhaps most importantly, the way Republican policies have heaped economic pain on communities that have finally had enough.

Featured Image is Beth Macy, by Meredith Roller