Beth Macy, a 2026 Democratic candidate for Virginia’s 6th Congressional District, has drawn some comparisons to a liberal version of Vice President JD Vance, Politico reported on Monday.
Macy previously served as an award-winning reporter for the Roanoke Times for 25 years and has also authored five nonfiction books, including “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America,” which was released in October and highlights the decline of her hometown of Urbana, Ohio, Politico reported. Vance similarly wrote “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” a 2016 memoir which in part covers the socioeconomic issues facing his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, as Politico notes.
Silas House, a bestselling Appalachian writer, told Politico that “she’s the opposite of JD Vance,” in reference to Macy. Meanwhile, Shannon Anderson, a sociologist at Roanoke College who is friends with Macy, told the outlet Macy is “what JD Vance could have been.”
A spokesperson for Vance and Macy’s campaign did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Macy wrote a Sept. 2024Â opinion piece for The New York Times (NYT) titled “I Grew Up Much Like JD Vance. How Did We End Up So Different?” She also claimed in an August 2022 interview with the NYT that Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” makes her feel “angry” every time she thinks about it.
“Vance blamed Appalachians’ woes on a crisis of masculinity and lack of thrift, overlooking the centuries of rapacious behavior on the part of out-of-state coal and pharma companies, and the bought-off politicians who failed to regulate them, and he took his stereotype-filled false narratives to the bank,” Macy told the NYT.
Macy told Cardinal News in an interview published on Nov. 18 that she believes Americans have “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 added that “the system just isn’t working for large numbers of people.”
“I think in any other time period it would be really hard to go from Beth Macy narrative journalist to Beth Macy congresswoman, but we are living in some very strange days,” Andrea Pitzer, an author and journalist and one of Macy’s closest friends, told Politico. “I think people are angry and people are aching to have somebody who’s willing to listen to them.”
Lon Wagner, a former reporter for the Virginian-Pilot who’s another one of Macy’s best friends, told Politico that “Beth is an intense listener.”
“I find myself telling Beth more deeply about something that’s happening in my life than I would almost anybody else,” Wagner added. “And if she can translate that into hearing constituents who haven’t been listened to …”
House also told Politico he thinks Macy “embodies the working class” in a way that Vance does not.
“And I think she just embodies the working class and understands the working class in a way that JD Vance — to my way of thinking, even though he came from the working class, he condescends to it,” House told the outlet. “He condescended to his own family in Hillbilly Elegy, he condescended to Appalachian people so terribly in that book — whereas what Beth Macy has done in her work, especially Dopesick in relation to Appalachia, she hasn’t romanticized or vilified the region. She simply told the truth and revealed the way that the system has been stacked against the people of Appalachia.”
When asked whether she thinks she could become something akin to a JD Vance for Democrats, Macy told Politico in an interview she believes that Vance is “just kind of pontificating.”
“Except for I’m going back and engaging with people and talking to them, and then I’m talking to experts, and then I’m talking to real people on the ground, and I’m going back and forth. He’s just kind of pontificating,” Macy the outlet.
“I wasn’t trying to launch a career,” she continued. “I was just, like, doing my job.”
Macy has pledged to “make life affordable again for working families, expand access to health and mental health care” and “invest in rural communities” if she is elected to Congress in 2026, according to her campaign website. However, Virginia’s 6th Congressional District has not elected a Democrat since 1990, Politico reported.
Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine has notably already endorsed Macy in the race for the state’s 6th Congressional District, The News Leader reported on Dec. 11. Additionally, former President Barack Obama named Macy’s “Paper Girl” as one of his favorite books of 2025.
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