Roanoke’s Beth Macy has been an award winning journalist, a bestselling author, the subject of a Jeopardy! question and now she’ll add “congressional candidate” to her resume.
Macy is set to announce her campaign to run for Virginia’s 6th Congressional District on Tuesday. She joined two other Democratic candidates, Pete Barlow and Ken Mitchell, seeking to challenge incumbent Republican Rep. Ben Cline, of Botetourt County, for his seat in the 2026 midterm election. The Democratic primary contest to determine who will face Cline will likely take place in June.
Macy, 61, sat in her office, which was repurposed from her youngest child’s bedroom, for her “first big interview of the campaign” on Friday. Her 1-year-old rescue terrier mix, Pippa, curled up on an armchair behind her, and slept peacefully after wreaking havoc in the house that morning and getting kicked out of doggy daycare later that day, Macy said.
Adhesive whiteboards covered in notes hung on the wall to Macy’s left. To her right was a table blanketed with papers and a copy of her most recent book, “Paper Girl,” a memoir about growing up poor in a small town and that town’s transformation over recent years into something poorer, angerier and nearly unrecognizable thanks, in large part, to technology and social media.
It was her working-class background and the knowledge that she gathered while researching and reporting for her books that motivated her to run for Congress.
“Starting under Reagan but really continuing under the Clinton administration, we took that ladder of mobility away from poor kids,” she said. “It’s something that sat with me for a long time.”
Macy grew up in Urbana, Ohio, a small town of about 11,000, about an hour outside of two of the state’s largest cities. She was the first person in her family to go to college after she received a Pell Grant through a federal grant program for low-income students. That grant, she said, covered tuition, room and board, and books. For “pizza and beer money,” she worked through a work-study program — a part-time job typically on campus for students with financial need.
After college, Macy worked at a number of news outlets in Ohio and Georgia before she joined The Roanoke Times in 1989. She left The Roanoke Times in 2014 but continued her journalism career as the author of five nonfiction books, at least two of which are bestsellers, that span topics from one man’s effort to save his Virginia-based factory as overseas manufacturing became more prevalent to the opioid epidemic and other topics.
From writing to running for Congress
“People lost faith in politics, they lost faith in the government and it’s rooted in the things that I’ve been writing about for years,” Macy said. “The system just isn’t working for large numbers of people.”
Her motivation to run for Congress stemmed from the reporting she has done for her books. She pointed to the research and reporting that she did to write Dopesick, a 2018 nonfiction book about the origin of the opioid epidemic.
“When you look at the trend, you can see that big pharma targets these exact same communities where the jobs have gone away. And the government let that happen. In fact, a lot of our officials are being bought off by big pharma now,” she said. “We really need to hold them accountable.”
Macy, who has spent a large portion of her career attracted to and reporting on the “underdog,” will enter into the race for the strongly Republican seat as an underdog herself.
She acknowledged that Cline’s seat will be difficult to win for a Democrat. The district, as it’s currently drawn, is considered solidly Republican and has been represented by a member of the GOP since 1993. Cline, who was first elected to Congress in 2018, was reelected to represent the district over his Democratic challenger by a margin of 28 percentage points in 2024.
“I want to go and I want to talk to the voters,” she said of her plan to campaign in a deep red district. “I want to see how their lives are being impacted.”
Macy made the decision to run for Congress over the course of this past year, after she attended rallies outside of Cline’s office.
Republican lawmakers across the country had halted town hall meetings with constituents when they turned contentious as the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” act was debated in Congress and after it was enacted. She said those rallies, along with the outcome of the 2025 elections in Virginia and elsewhere, where Democrats saw resounding victories, led to her decision to run for Congress.
“I have decided that I’m done writing and exploring these issues, it’s time to do something about it,” she said.
“We saw this blue wave [on Nov. 4] in Virginia, which was great, and you started to see even the counties that are still red starting to go a little bit blue. People are getting it — that we’ve been conned and the system is rigged,” she said.
She added that her campaign will not accept corporate PAC money. Instead, she said her campaign will be funded by “$10, $50, $100 at a time, by going out and talking to people.”
Affordability will be a key campaign platform for Macy
The same theme echoed around Macy, among her friends and neighbors, in the months that led up to her campaign announcement: the cost of living is too high and federal lawmakers aren’t doing enough to help people who are struggling to make ends meet.
Her main campaign strategy is to talk to as many people across the 6th District as possible.
“I want to get out and I want to learn more from the farmers about how the tariffs are impacting them,” she said.
She added that health care is a main pain point for many. She said she has heard from people who are scared about the impending skyrocketing increase for health insurance bought through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace, should Congress fail to extend the current level of tax credit subsidies for the program.
Protecting access to Medicaid will be another part of her platform, along with repealing the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” act and fighting against cuts to federal funding for social programs.
“The number one thing is affordability,” she said. “Health care is life or death.”
She added that support for both K-12 and affordable higher education will be another crucial part of her campaign.
“We need to make really clear pipelines between the jobs that industries have and what the community colleges are teaching,” she said.
The ruby red congressional district could be redrawn
Congressional district lines may be redrawn before the midterm elections, after the Democratic-controlled General Assembly introduced and passed a constitutional amendment to do so during a special session in early November.
The General Assembly will need to again pass the amendment during the 2026 session, and then the measure will go before voters, who will have the final say in a referendum. It’s unclear what the new 6th Congressional District could look like — official maps for redistricting have not yet been made available.
General Assembly Democrats have said that the goal of the redistricting effort is to reduce the number of Republican-held congressional seats after several Republican-controlled states have redistricted to lessen the number of Democratic-held congressional seats, starting with Texas, followed by Missouri and North Carolina. Democratic-controlled California passed its referendum to do so on Nov. 4.
Macy acknowledged that it will be difficult to campaign without knowing whether the district will be redrawn and what the new district would look like until well into the 2026 election cycle.
“It’s hard to know, it’s hard to plan for. I was prepared to do it even if the map stays as it is — I feel that strongly about it,” she said.