The independent, who changed aviation law after her daughter died in a Boeing crash, says Neal plays politics with people’s lives. Her husband works for Trump, her sons were arrested by Israel on a Gaza aid flotilla, and her uncle is Ralph Nader. It's complicated.
Pictured: Sheffield resident Nadia Milleron (right) and her husband Michael Stumo (center) lobby congress to pass aviation legislation after the death of their daughter in a 2019 Boeing airplane crash.
Nadia Milleron got the call at home in Sheffield on a March morning in 2019. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 had gone down outside Addis Ababa six minutes after takeoff, with her daughter Samya Stumo, 24, aboard. All 157 passengers and crew died. It was the second crash of a Boeing 737 MAX in five months.
What happened next put Milleron's name on the ballot in Massachusetts' 1st Congressional District (which includes Berkshire County) in 2024 and again this year on November 3, but the tragedy is just part of a complex, long-shot candidacy to replace one of Congress’s most senior members, Democrat Richard Neal.
Milleron, 62, says she is not a politician, though she does have a family filled with activists. Her uncle is Ralph Nader, her husband currently works on tariff policy in the Trump White House (hold on, we’ll get to that), and two of her sons were recently arrested and imprisoned by the Israeli government for a week after piloting boats in an aid flotilla to Gaza (we’ll get to that too). But it was the government’s failure to protect her daughter that got her involved.
"After the plane crash, I went to Congress and helped organize families, not because I thought, ‘How could I move Boeing and the FAA?,’" She says. "But because I thought I could warn people. Samya didn't know the plane was dangerous. So I thought, ‘Well, if I make as much noise as possible, then passengers and crew will be able to protect themselves in a way that the FAA is not protecting them.’"
Initially it worked. In December 2020, Congress passed the Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act, the largest overhaul of aircraft certification in decades, in a divided Congress. "I was completely shocked," she says.
Then she went to Illinois, where Boeing is based, and spent a month in a Motel 6 in Springfield lobbying for a bill allowing punitive damages in wrongful death cases. It passed in 2023. But, Milleron is quick to add, Boing has avoided any criminal liability.
Ralph Nader, storied Green Party presidential candidate and consumer safety pioneer had dinner with his great-niece the night before she boarded her flight to Africa. Just weeks after Samya’s death Nader called his grieving niece and gave her some tough love.
"He was the one who told me you have to get up off the couch, because victims' families can have a big impact on whether an issue is addressed," she says. "He said, ‘If you don't stand up as a grieving family, there is going to be a third crash, and you are going to be complicit.’” Milleron calls Nader her hero and says his influence on her is "huge."
Richard Neal has represented Western Massachusetts in Congress since 1989. He is the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, which he chaired from 2019 to 2023. His case for reelection to a 20th term is that his seniority is service, and has lead to direct benefit to the district, including the reopening of North Adams Regional Hospital, $14.6 million for a Hoosic River bridge, $12.5 million in brownfield cleanup, and more than $400 million for the district as a result of federal infrastructure and climate policy he was part of.
"I put everything into that to get that reopened, and it worked," he told the Berkshire Eagle about the hospital. "But you can do that when you're a senior member, and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee doesn't hurt either."
He is also among the largest recipients of corporate political action committees money in Congress. According to Federal Election Commission filings, during his 2026 re-election campaign thus far Neal has secured $1,557,500 from PACs. Since 2010, according to an analysis of watchdog organization OpenSecrets data by regional publication the Shoestring, only two House members have taken in PAC dollars, and roughly two-thirds of what he raised in that period came from corporate PACs. In the 2023–24 cycle, donations under $200 made up just 0.13 percent of Neal’s committee's funding.
In an anti-establishment election year, Neal’s seniority and corporate entanglements were no help in the primary. He almost lost. On September 1, progressive Democrat Jeromie Whalen, a 39-year-old high school teacher running on Medicare for All and refusing corporate money, took 45.9 percent in the party primary and won Holyoke outright. About 42,000 Democrats voted against Neal. Milleron, who took 37.3 percent as an independent in the 2024 general election, sees a real opening.
"We look at the Democratic primary. Whalen, an unknown candidate, did very well against Richard Neal, and now we're coming into the general election where we not only have those disaffected Democrats, but we also have independents and Republicans," she says. "And yes, I can win."
No Republican is on the ballot. Neal's only opponents are Milleron and a second independent, progressive Anthony Celata.
Milleron's case against Neal starts with what she says he didn't do after her daughter died. He was her congressman. She says his office was avoidant while she was lobbying in the Capitol for the safety bill. "Richard Neal was nonresponsive to us in our efforts to get aviation safety," she says.
Neal disputes that. He said in 2024 that he met with her husband, Michael Stumo, and one of their sons, in Washington and in Springfield, and he "strongly denies" being dismissive.
The congressman has accepted $48,500 in donations from Boeing since 2016, per OpenSecrets data, combining the company's PAC and donations from its employees.
"I didn't feel it was a quid pro quo," she says. "I just thought that his focus wasn’t on us, it was on protecting the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, and the financial services industry."
Her complaint isn't that he was bought. It's that his priorities were elsewhere, calling him an “old boy”-style Democrat, implying that he dismisses anyone who doesn’t fit in his narrow political view of the world.
Neal’s office has not yet replied to a request for comments on the topics discussed in this article.
This is where Milleron’s candidacy may get complicated for progressive voters in Berkshire County.
Michael Stumo, Milleron’s husband of 34 years, founded the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) in 2007—billed as a bipartisan advocate for manufacturing and production industries— and ran it until early 2025, when he left to take a job in the Trump administration. He is now associate director for economic policy at the White House Office of Management and Budget, reporting to Director Russ Vought, one of the principal authors of Project 2025. CPA consulted with Vought on the tariff policy in Project 2025, which advocates for using tariff pressure to drive industry back to the US.
For a candidate courting 42,000 Democrats who just voted against Neal from the left, the fact that her husband currently works in a controversial office for a wildly unpopular Republican administration could be a problem.
Milleron hopes the electorate will judge her on her own merits, not Stumo’s. She doesn't disagree with her husband’s underlying economic positions but doesn't defend Trump’s implementation of them either. She makes two arguments to circle the square. The first is consistency: her husband protested the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, worked with Biden's trade representative Katherine Tai, and has pushed for domestic manufacturing of generic drugs and hospital supplies for 20 years across three presidents. The office he works in, she notes, was created under Biden, and its Buy America program was written into law by Democrats.
She says Trump’s tariff policies are failing because they do not conform to what her husband actually proposes. "We cannot do tariffs by tweet," she says. "You have to be predictable. You can't be extreme in your use of tariffs." She argues tariffs are a legitimate industrial tool, and that rebuilding manufacturing takes longer than a single presidential term. However, in February, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the president lacked authority to impose the emergency tariffs at the center of the policy her husband helps craft.
If she’s elected, Milleron says she would join a vote to impeach Trump and members of his administration. "How could I possibly support criminals staying in their positions?"
Asked whether that commitment holds even if it costs her husband his job, she pauses.
"I have to vote my conscience," she says. Adding, "what a miserable thought."
She says there is a moral distinction between working inside an administration you don’t agree with and the behavior of the administration at large, comparing it to a Palestinian employed by American defense and technology firms. "These terrible contradictions do happen in our economic lives," she says. "But we are not war criminals like Neal and Trump are," referring specifically to their support for supplying weapons and funding to Israel during their occupation of Palestine.
Speaking of Palestine, In August 2025, Milleron flew to Barcelona to help her sons load boats attempting to bring food and medicine into Gaza by sea.
Adnaan Stumo, 32, is a sailboat captain who has crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific. Torleif Stumo, 26, known as Tor, is a ship's engineer trained at SUNY Maritime. Both grew up in Sheffield. They sailed two boats on August 31 with the Global Sumud Flotilla. Their mother inventoried the cargo on shore before they left and sat through the nonviolence training.
The flotilla came under attack twice, at anchor outside Tunis in early September and again off Crete later that month, in an assault lasting about three hours. Organizers and video pointed to drones dropping incendiary devices onto the boats.
On October 1 and 2, Israeli forces intercepted the fleet in international waters about 70 nautical miles from Gaza. Tor's boat, the Huga, was taken first. Adnaan captained the Mikeno, among the last seized. Both refused to sign deportation papers and were held at Ketziot prison in the Negev, where they went on hunger strike for six days. They were released to Jordan on October 7 and landed at Dulles on October 10. Milleron says Israeli soldiers beat Tor and that he came home with nerve damage in his hands.
She says her sons reported that pieces of munitions recovered by the flotilla indicated they were “made in Pennsylvania." She went on to disclose that her husband went to the State Department directly to tell them that the munitions used against his sons' boats were American-made. "He could have lost his job for that, but he did it," she says. "Of course he did it. It's his children."
That account can't currently be independently confirmed, and Stumo doesn't appear in the media coverage of his sons' detention. What is documented is that Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren, Edward Markey, and three colleagues wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the department's "failure to provide timely" assistance to the detained Americans. Upon his return to the states, Tor told the American Prospect that the State Department "had no interest" in speaking with the family's lawyers.
As complicated as her family entanglements may be, Milleron says when it comes to her candidacy she is laser focused on three priorities: eliminating federal income tax on earnings under $100,000, getting insurance companies out of health care, and rebuilding manufacturing, including bringing a federal medical manufacturing zone to her district.
On other social issues her positions don’t slot neatly into a single party ideology. She would abolish ICE while rejecting open borders. Milleron calls for an end to US weapons and funding for Israel, but would also cut off funding for Ukraine, accepting that a truce in that conflict may have to include ceding land to Russia.
She backs an assault weapons ban, red flag laws, and universal background checks, but says she is a gun owner who believes the 2024 Massachusetts state gun law priced rural families out of safety training.
Milleron also supports gender-affirming care and federal anti-discrimination protections for transgender people but while campaigning she also publicly dropped a phrase that caused her some trouble with progressives. She described herself as "socially conservative," and now says she wishes she hadn't. "If I had to say it again, I wouldn't use those words, because it has been so misinterpreted." She says she only meant to imply she believes in the power of marriage and commitment as "a stabilizing force," and that extends to gay marriage. She’s not against any gender or sexual identity, but she does oppose promiscuity and polyamory.
Milleron says she knows the odds are against her. She also has a record of long-shot wins: a federal aviation safety law, a state punitive damages statute, and, this spring, a $49.5 million jury verdict against Boeing that she refuses to call a victory.
"This trial that we just had was not about accountability," she says. "It was just about money. Our family was on trial." The criminal case against Boeing was dismissed by the courts last November under a non-prosecution deal.
Milleron says she was pushed into service, not called to it. She knows her candidacy is not a tidy package. She has a husband working inside an administration she would vote to impeach. Two sons home from an Israeli prison. A daughter that no amount of money can bring home, and an uncle who challenged her to get up. She says she wouldn’t be doing it if she didn’t have to.
"If I had a good legislator, then I wouldn't be running," she says. "I want to establish a new standard for how that office is managed."
