Sheffield — Sheffield resident Nadia Milleron launched her campaign for Congress on Wednesday, March 13, opposing incumbent Congressman Richard Neal (D).
Neal was previously the mayor of Springfield from 1984 to 1988. He was elected to the House of Representatives for Massachusetts’ 2nd Congressional District back in 1988. He was reelected to the 2nd Congressional District 11 times before changing districts and then being elected to the House of Representatives for the state’s 1st Congressional District in 2012.
According to her website, Milleron was born in California and moved to Massachusetts in 1982 to attend Smith College in Northampton. She graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in government and eventually earned a doctorate of jurisprudence from the University of Iowa in 1994. In 1999, she moved with her husband Michael Stumo to farmland in Sheffield.
In March 2019, Stumo and Milleron lost their daughter, Samya Rose Stumo, at the age of 24, in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which was a Boeing 737 Max 8 airplane. Since their daughter’s death, Milleron has campaigned and advocated for increased safety measures for airplanes, including advocating for the Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act, which was passed in December 2020 by Congress.
Milleron’s campaign originally scheduled an online Zoom press conference for Wednesday, March 13. According to an email from campaign representative John Krol, however, the press conference was canceled because “We had some reporters who were interested in doing a one-on-one earlier so we accommodated.” Instead, Milleron agreed to a phone interview with The Berkshire Edge.
During the interview, Millerson said that her daughter’s death five years ago remains in the forefront of her mind. “I started getting involved in politics after my daughter died in a Boeing crash,” Milleron told The Berkshire Edge. “I was apolitical before because I thought politics was disgusting and the people involved with it were awful, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. But what I discovered is that if you don’t do anything, then things get worse.”
Millerson said that she has never run for office before, either locally or nationally, and has never held a position in municipal or federal government. “We rely on the government to protect us in terms of our food, or medicine, or transportation, and all of this is falling apart,” she said. “Due to corporate interests, companies don’t produce good products. Executives strip mine their companies, and the U.S. government looks the other way. I was forced into this situation [of politics] because my daughter died on a Boeing plane. It was defective in terms of its design, but also in terms of its manufacturing. There was only one sensor on it, how could that be possible? That’s not even within the realm of any engineering school. Those engineers would fail any normal engineering school program. And the U.S. government looked the other way and certified those planes and let them keep performing after the first crash.”
After the Boeing crash, Milleron met with members of Congress, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the Federal Aviation Administration to advocate for changes to regulations for airplane safety. “And what I saw was that Neal didn’t fight for us in that situation,” Milleron said. “But he has received over $70,000 from Boeing for his campaigns, and he has received money from pharmaceutical companies. In December, he voted against transparency in pharmaceutical pricing. So you see, I saw the pattern with Boeing, but then I saw that it was just all over the place. If I and other people don’t stand up and change the situation, it’s just gonna get so bad. Our lives are being threatened, just like how my daughter died. But then again people die and suffer slow deaths because they don’t have proper medicine. They don’t have doctors, they don’t have all the things that a rich country can make sure are in place.”
Milleron said that last year she helped to change an Illinois law that allowed corporations to avoid punitive damages and punishment for products that harmed and killed people. Boeing is headquartered in Illinois, and Milleron said that she traveled out to the state to campaign for the change to the law, which eventually passed in the summer of 2023. “You have to have punitive damages for wrongful injury and the ultimate injury, death,” she said. “It just makes sense. A person like myself doesn’t need to have [political] experience. Look at what the people with experience are doing. They are corrupt. It even helps if you don’t have [political] experience. You should have a clear vision of how we should be treated as human beings.”
When asked if anyone who has political experience is corrupt, Milleron said, “No, I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that there are enough of them that have political experience that are not serving the interests of the public, and that is not going well.”
When asked if she thought that Neal was corrupt, Milleron responded, “No, I voted for him many times.”
When asked whether she supported President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election, Milleron said she did not support either of the two candidates. “I don’t support either of the main presidential candidates,” Milleron said. “I’m not behind either of them. But whoever is there, I’m going to work with them. I’m not a person who just crosses anybody off at this point, seeing how bipartisan legislation can get passed. I don’t cross people off. I look for the commonality and see how we can get work done.”
When it comes to abortion rights, Milleron, while not expressly supporting abortion, expressed that the choice should be between the patient and the doctor. “That’s not my business in terms of interfering with somebody’s choice,” Milleron said. “As a personal matter, I wouldn’t have an abortion, but I wouldn’t interfere with somebody else’s. I don’t know what’s going on in their life. That’s between them and their doctor, and I think that everybody should have every healthcare possibility available to them. It’s just not my business.”
When pressed again for an answer, Milleron elaborated, “I think I’d have to look at the particular legislation, whatever would come up. That’s a divisive issue, and I’m going to stay as far away as I can. I know that I have to make decisions as a legislator on divisive issues. But I would just have to evaluate them one at a time. And I want to stick with issues that we all agree need to be addressed in terms of my advocacy. But as far as divisive issues, I’ll just have to take it when it comes up. But I do have parameters, ethical parameters that I stated, which is that each person should have a full right to the healthcare that they and their doctor determine that they need, and that it is not my business. So those are my ethical parameters. And then I’d have to look at whatever decisions would have to be made.”
When asked about whether or not the United States should continue to send aid to Ukraine in their war with Russia, and if the United States should continue to send funds to Israel, Milleron said, “No money for foreign wars.” She explained, “That money belongs here. We have suffering going on here in our district. Some people don’t have sufficient medical care, and people that die way too early because they just didn’t get their medical needs addressed. And we need to focus on what’s going on in our own country and pull that money back.”
Adding to her further criticism about Neal, Milleron said that Neal has not been accessible to his constituents. “He hasn’t had any town hall meetings since 2017,” Milleron said. “He is very difficult to meet. I have heard from so many people who tell me that he doesn’t respond and he doesn’t return phone calls.”
Milleron said that, while she is running as an unaffiliated candidate, she has a chance to defeat Neal. “To me, the major point of this campaign is to empower the voter and to highlight their concerns and their suffering,” Milleron said. “But if you look at the probabilities, it’s very difficult because I’m not in a political party. I think it’s going to be uphill, but if it happens, it will be a tremendous achievement of the voters themselves to take back their tax dollars and take back their power.”
For more information about Nadia Milleron and her campaign, visit the campaign’s website.
Editor’s note: After this article came out, Milleron told The Berkshire Edge that she is running as an unaffiliated candidate and not an independent party candidate. While some of her campaign material, seen here, lists that she is “independent” Milleron told The Berkshire Edge that she is “not in an independent party”.
