VA-06: She's Written Bestsellers About Appalachian Struggles. She's Running for Office. But Don't Compare Her to Vance.

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3. "it's a piece of political terrain that's dependably elected a Republican for more than 30 years."

Saying she has a tall task is very polite .
But one never knows these days.



Macy is, she stressed here more than once, “not a politician” — a useful thing to be able to say in the maiden candidacy of any would-be politician. Turning her candidacy into an actual spot in Congress figures to be a tall task. In a district that shoots north from Roanoke to the Loudoun County line along Interstate 81 and the Appalachians, she’s pitted against two other Democrats in next June’s primary — the winner of which gets to go up against a four-term incumbent in the Trump-endorsed Ben Cline. Potential mid-decade, Democratic-led redistricting could rejigger the map, but as it stands it’s a piece of political terrain that’s dependably elected a Republican for more than 30 years.

Macy is positioned ideologically as a socially progressive economic populist — a kind of new-era New Dealer who lives in a semi-urban speck of blue surrounded by so many shades of suburban and rural red. Her fledgling platform to my ear stems straight from the sort of super-story she’s been stitching together in her books — a “crisis of opportunity,” as she calls it, the wreckage wrought in small towns and rural regions by the consequences of the .......................