Joy Powers

Joy Powers lives in Bedford, Virginia. She is a rancher and a small business owner.

She has been affiliated with the following organizations:

Virginia FFA

Virginia 4-H

Chamblissburg Ruritans

Virginia Simmental Association

Virginia Farm Bureau

Bedford County Fair, superintendent

Bedford County Agricultural Economic Development Advisory Board

Restore the Harvest, founder[1]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

Southwest Virginia does not need another politician who talks about us like we are a problem to solve. We need representation rooted in this place, accountable

For too long, our communities have been talked about, studied, promised to, and left behind. We have watched hospitals close, schools struggle, small towns lose jobs, family farms get squeezed, and working people pay more while getting less. The same politicians keep showing up with the same recycled promises, then go back to Washington and vote for someone else’s agenda.

I am running because SWVA deserves real representation. Rooted representation. Someone who knows these roads, these farms, these schools, these hollers, and these families because this is where I come from too. That is why I created the HOME Plan: Healthcare, Opportunity, Markets, and Education.

Healthcare that reaches rural people before they are in crisis. Opportunity that brings jobs, childcare, housing, broadband, and infrastructure back to our communities. Markets that actually work for farmers, small businesses, and local producers instead of squeezing them out. Education that protects our schools, invests in trades, and gives every child a real future close to home. This campaign is not about performing for a party. It is about fighting for the place that raised us.

Southwest Virginia is not a backdrop. It is not a talking point. It is not something politicians get to use and forget.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

I believe healthcare is a human right, and I support universal healthcare. But universal coverage alone will not fix the healthcare crisis in Southwest Virginia if there is nowhere close to home to receive care. My HOME Plan fights for both: affordable coverage for every person and real investment in rural hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, EMS, mental health care, maternal care, and the healthcare workforce. Rural communities need more than a card in their wallet. We need care we can actually reach.Southwest Virginia does not lack workers, talent, or grit. We lack the investment needed to connect our people to opportunity. My HOME Plan focuses on rebuilding the foundations of a real rural economy: rail, roads, broadband, energy, water and sewer infrastructure, industrial sites, small businesses, agriculture, manufacturing, and the trades. We need jobs that let people stay, raise families, and build wealth here at home. SWVA does not need empty promises. We need the tools to move goods, grow businesses, and compete.Every child in Southwest Virginia deserves a strong public school close to home. My HOME Plan supports full funding for Title I, IDEA special education funding, Head Start, school nutrition, and career and technical education. I will fight for federal investment in rural school buildings, teacher pay, bus transportation, broadband, apprenticeships, dual enrollment, community colleges, and trade programs tied to local jobs in healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, energy, construction, and small business. Education is not just a classroom issue. It is a workforce issue, an economic issue, and a community survival issue.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

I’m passionate about rural representation because I’m tired of watching people make decisions about communities they do not know and will never have to answer to.

Here, policy is not some abstract debate. It is whether the hospital is open. Whether your kid’s school gets shut down. Whether your farm can survive another year. Whether your grocery bill, power bill, medicine, insurance, and childcare keep eating up every dollar you make.

That is what drives me.

Healthcare, education, agriculture, infrastructure, jobs, and affordability are all connected in rural places. When one system fails, the whole community feels it.

For too long, Southwest Virginia has been talked about instead of listened to. I am running because we deserve represen

Campaign websitePowers' campaign website stated the following:Where do you stand on data centers?Let me be plain about this. Southwest Virginia is not a sacrifice zone, and I am done watching us get treated like one.We know this story. For generations, this region powered the country. They took the coal out of these mountains, sent the profit somewhere else, and left us with the sickness, the fouled water, and the empty towns when they were finished. Now the same kind of outside money is back, eyeing our old mine sites and our cheap land for massive data centers, some of them with their own gas power plants, looking to drink down billions of gallons of our water to cool their servers.And here is the part that should make everyone angry: We are already paying for it. The power these data centers demand has driven electricity costs up across Virginia, so your bill is climbing whether one ever gets built in your county or not. We get the higher bill now, and they want our land and our water on top of it. They will come to the county meetings promising jobs and tax revenue. We have heard that promise before. The truth is these places run on relatively few permanent workers once they are built, they come with some of the most generous tax breaks in the state, and the costs land on us long after the ribbon is cut.​I am not against good jobs or new investment. I am against being exploited again. If a project cannot run without raising your power bill, draining our water, and pocketing a tax break the rest of us pay for, then it is not a good deal for Southwest Virginia, and I will say so plainly. This region has given enough.​The cost of everything keeps going up. What is your plan?I will be straight with you. No member of Congress flips a switch and makes groceries cheap again. Anyone who tells you they can is lying to you. But Washington is not neutral here. Trade fights and tariffs have raised the cost of fuel, fertilizer, and a lot of what farmers buy and what families pay at checkout. The biggest corporations keep posting record profits while working people are told to just tighten their belts. I am running to put real weight back on the side of working people. That means going after the price-gouging and the consolidation that lets a handful of companies set the price of your food, your seed, and your medicine. It means measuring every policy by one question: does this make life here easier or harder?You talk a lot about corporate power. Why?Because I have watched it up close.​Income inequality is about as wide as it has ever been. A small number of corporations now have a hand in nearly every level of government, writing the rules they then profit from. When four companies control the meatpacking, the independent cattle farmer takes whatever price they are given.​This is not a left or right thing here. People across the political map are tired of being squeezed by faraway interests that do not know us and do not answer to us. I want to be the kind of representative those interests do not get to buy.Rural hospitals keep cutting services. What would you do?This is an issue that keeps me up at night. In June 2026, a report to Virginia's Joint Commission on Health Care found that roughly a dozen rural hospitals in the Commonwealth are at risk of closing or cutting back, and several of them are right here in Southwest Virginia. Even when a hospital stays open, we keep watching the labor and delivery unit close, then the surgery, then the specialists. A new mom should not have to drive an hour and a half to deliver a baby. A heart attack should not become a death sentence because the nearest ER shut its doors.​A big part of this traces back to recent federal Medicaid changes that pulled billions out of Virginia hospitals starting this year. I would fight to protect that funding, because for rural hospitals it is not extra. It is the difference between open and closed.The man who currently represents us chairs the House subcommittee that oversees health policy. After more than a decade in that seat, our hospitals are less stable, not more. I think we can do better than that. What about farmers and agriculture?Agriculture is my life, so this one is personal. Farmers in our region are getting squeezed from both ends. Input costs like fuel and fertilizer are up, and tariffs have cost producers some of their best export markets, which pushes prices down right when costs are climbing.​Congress is finishing work on a new farm bill this year. I want a farm bill that actually serves family-scale and independent producers, not just the biggest operations. That means a strong safety net, fair access to federal programs, real support for local food systems, and standing up for the right to repair the equipment you already paid for. Rural economic development should build up the land and the people here, not sell them out. How do we keep young people from leaving?We give them a reason to stay. Young people do not leave because they want to. They leave because the jobs, the childcare, the housing, and the internet are somewhere else. If we want them to build a life here, we have to build the things a life here requires. That means good jobs and the trades, real broadband that reaches the last mile, affordable childcare, and infrastructure that does not crumble. When the opportunity leaves, the people leave. When the people leave, the school consolidates and the hospital closes. We break that cycle by investing in the front end of it.Where do you stand on public schools?Our schools are the anchor of the community. When a rural school closes, the town it sat in starts to come apart.I am a proud public school parent, public school graduate and I am a public school advocate. I want strong funding for our schools, fair pay for the teachers we already struggle to keep, and real investment in career and technical education and our community colleges. Not every good future runs through a four-year degree, and our schools should reflect that.Are you anti-gun?No. I support the Second Amendment. I am a different kind of Democrat, and that is one of the places I part ways with the national party. The people I grew up around hunt, farm, and protect their families, and I am not interested in lecturing them about it. I will work on keeping communities safe in ways that respect law-abiding gun owners, because around here that is most people.What about LGBTQ Virginians?Where I come from, you judge a person by whether they show up, work hard, and treat people right. Not by who they are or who they love. The land does not ask anybody who they love before the sun comes up. The work is the work, and a neighbor is a neighbor. I believe every Virginian deserves to be treated with dignity and to be equal under the law. That is not complicated to me. It is just how I was raised to treat people. We do not have to agree on everything to agree on that much. I am not interested in using anyone's family as a political talking point, and I am tired of watching politicians do it. I want every person in this district to have a representative who sees them as worth fighting for.Where do you stand on AIPAC and U.S. aid to Israel?I will give you a straight answer, because you deserve one: I do not take my orders from AIPAC or any other lobby. Our foreign policy should be made in Washington, in the interest of the American people, not handed over to a foreign government or the groups that carry its water. Your representative should answer to the people of this district, and no one else.​And I do not think American families should keep paying for what Benjamin Netanyahu's government is doing. He is under an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes. We send Israel's government billions in weapons and taxpayer dollars every year with almost no conditions and no accountability, and I would end that. I do not believe families here, the ones struggling to afford groceries and keep their hospitals open, should be footing that bill.​I want the hostages home. I want the killing to stop. I want safety and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians alike. But a real friend tells the truth, and the truth is that our weapons should come with our values attached.Why are you running for Congress?Because Southwest Virginia deserves a representative who actually knows it.​I am a farmer, a mom, and a small business owner. I have driven the long miles to get my family to a doctor. I have watched the grocery bill climb. I have seen good young people leave because there was nothing built to keep them here.I am not running against this district. I am running to represent it. My loyalty is not to a party or to Washington. It is to the people of the Ninth.What does "rooted representation" mean?It means a representative who lives the consequences of the votes they cast. Too many decisions about rural Virginia get made by people who have never set foot here. Rooted representation is the opposite of that. It is practical solutions over partisan performance. It is showing up, knowing the place, and fighting for it whether or not it makes national news.Will you just vote the party line?No. I will work with anyone who wants to help my district, and fight anyone wants to hurt it. I do not care whether a good idea comes from a Democrat, a Republican, or the person sitting across the kitchen table from me. If it helps people here, I want to work on it. And I will tell you when I think my own party has it wrong, because you deserve a representative who tells you the truth more than they protect a team.Why does rural representation matter so much to you?Because we keep getting used as a talking point instead of being treated as a place worth fighting for.​We saw it again this year in the fight over Virginia's congressional maps. Rural communities are small enough to get carved up, overlooked, and taken for granted by both parties when it is convenient. I am running so the Ninth has someone whose whole reason for being there is this place and the people in it.What is your contrast with the current representative?I will keep this factual, because the record speaks for itself.​After more than a decade of the same representation in Washington, people here are still driving farther for healthcare, paying more at the grocery store, and watching their kids leave to find opportunity somewhere else. Our rural hospitals are more at risk today, not less. That is not an accident. It is what happens when a place gets taken for granted for too long.​This is not personal. It is about results. I think the Ninth deserves a representative who measures success by whether life here is actually getting better.— Joy Powers' campaign website (July 9, 2026)Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.

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