I said and wrote ahead of Tuesday’s final day in the 2026 election cycle that it would take the biggest blue wave of all-time for Beth Macy to get to 50 percent-plus-one vote in the Sixth District, and, well.
We just had the biggest blue wave of all-time, and Macy – the ideal Democratic congressional candidate for the Sixth, in that she’s one of us, in tune with what we need, and able to raise gobs of money – still only ended up at 44.3 percent.
That showing, yeah, sure, is the best of any Democratic nominee in the last 18 election cycles, dating back to 1992 – in that span, we’d only had one other Dem get over 40 percent.
Still.
When the final accounting is in, we’re going to know that the Macy campaign raised more than $3 million,a million more than the incumbent, Ben Cline, whose wisest spending came back in the spring, when he launched a political and legal effort to oppose and then overturn the redistricting amendment that would have gerrymandered him out of his seat.
After the MAGA majority on the Virginia Supreme Court did their magic there, Cline ran a campaign for re-election that was straight out of the MAGA playbook – which is to say, nothing he said from mid-May on had anything to do with the Sixth District in any way, shape or form.
The main thrust of the message from Cline: durrrr, socialists, bad.
Macy, best-known for her best-seller, Dopesick, a book diving into the cause-and-effect of the opioid crisis on Rural Virginia, is also the author of another work of non-fiction, Factory Man, that examined the impact of NAFTA on rural communities, a main message of that book being, a generation of folks who lost their jobs in communities that were stripped of their hearts and souls were never going to forgive Democrats for making that happen.
If you have a better explanation for why we still can’t win here, in the midst of an epic blue wave, I’m all ears.
Certainly, a big part of it is, it’s not like our side has been trying that hard since the ‘90s, post-NAFTA, to reach out to rural voters – in the Sixth District, specifically, we’ve largely just ceded the territory to Republicans, including several election cycles in which we literally didn’t even run opposition.
And then, out of the ether, comes Beth Macy, the perfect Democrat to make things interesting in the Sixth – progressive, but not out of touch; savvy, but not condescending.
Texas went blue, by a double-digit margin. North Carolina and South Carolina are sending Democrats to the U.S. Senate.
At this writing, Mississippi appears poised to send a Black Democrat to the U.S. Senate.
And not only could we not get Beth Macy across the finish line, we couldn’t even get her to 45 percent.
Cline got 69.9 percent of the vote in Augusta County and 65.5 percent in Rockingham County, which I note because, Augusta and Rockingham are #1 and #2 in beef-cattle production in Virginia, and among the leaders nationwide – and Cline had not even a single word to say in defense of local farmers when Donald Trump introduced his plan in September to flood the market with cheap foreign beef.
Augusta Health, last year, in response to the sweeping cuts to Medicaid from the Big Beautiful Bill that Cline voted for and Trump signed into law, closed several urgent-care facilities in rural communities.
One of those facilities was in Buena Vista, which gave Cline 63.1 percent of its vote.
Cline, during the fall campaign, went on a junket to Silicon Valley to allow himself to be wined and dined by Google, which just so happens to be working on a new data center in Botetourt County, right there in Cline’s backyard, in the face of significant local opposition.
Botetourt County gave Cline 67.9 percent of its vote.
ICYMI: Voting against your interests
- Ben Cline pretends to listen to farmers, as Valley beef industry struggles to keep up
- Big Ugly Bill fallout | Augusta Medical Group closing three primary care facilities
- Botetourt County suit challenges local government on data center vote
These are all stark examples of people voting against their interests, and there’s no excuse, because Beth Macy gave them a viable alternative.
Instead of sending Macy to DC to actually represent us, we’re returning Cline, who in his eight years in Congress to date has not passed a single piece of legislation of any significance to make our lives better.
Best evidence of that: for months, his congressional Facebook page has featured, in the Featured spot at the top, a report from WHSV touting the $17 million that he secured through a budget amendment for Interstate 81 improvements.
As we’ve told you, $17 million might fund a mile of improvements along the 325-mile I-81 corridor in Virginia.
That’s what he thinks you need to know there – that he got us money from Trump to fix a mile of our interstate.
Working hard for you.
And you folks are sending him back to Washington, to, do what, exactly?
The best he could do with MAGAs in the majority was get us a mile of improvements on I-81; he’s going to be a do-nothing guy in a Congress with an 85-seat Democratic majority starting in January.
Ben Cline is going to spend the next two years pretending to have a spine from the last seat on the back bench, his work on our behalf consisting of sending out the occasional tersely worded press release to tell us durrrr, socialists, bad.
You could have had somebody who is one of us – who hasn’t spent their entire adult life working in government while pretending to hate it; who’s had to figure out which bill to pay and which one could slide a couple of weeks so that she could buy groceries; who, for chrissakes, knows not to wear loafers when a farmer invites her out for a tour of the operations.
I hope, against hope, that Beth Macy gives it one more try, in the 2028 cycle, which is already shaping up to be another blue wave – because it’s clear that the MAGAs aren’t going to go quietly into the night, despite the rebuke that they were just handed, and as a result, we’re going to be running with a tailwind with a wave that could be akin to Nixon-McGovern or Reagan-Mondale.
She’s laid the foundation; now it’s time to start putting up the frame.
It was always going to be that kind of hard work out our way.
The Sixth District encompasses an area that has been Republican since Reconstruction – when the Republican Party was the Party of Lincoln, which fought the other side of the Civil War, because our economy wasn’t dependent upon slave labor, as was the case east of the Blue Ridge.
Mountain Valley Republicans, as they came to be known, voted Republican even as the rest of the state kept the Byrd Machine of the heirs of the plantation Democrats in power for the next 100 years.
The parents and grandparents of the Gen X’ers who make up the bulk of the voting base today were Mountain Valley Republicans.
Our headwind as Democrats out this way is that the Gen X’ers and younger mistook the MAGA brand as somehow being the spiritual heir to the Mountain Valley brand.
My hopium on this is on the side of, let’s not look at what Beth Macy did this cycle – raising gobs of money, forcing Ben Cline to sweat a little – and say, Well, we tried, but it’s not worth it, investing that kind of money and effort in the Sixth; that money and effort would be better spent elsewhere.
It’s not about winning to me; it’s about helping us get people in office who will actually work for us, not the monied elites, whose main focus is perpetuating the tax cuts and government handouts that make them wealthier, as we struggle to keep the lights on.
Nothing personal against Ben Cline, but he’s an errand boy.
We have too much that needs fixing out our way to keep sending a loafer-wearing errand boy to Congress in our names.
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Chris Graham
