After a tough Democratic primary against political newcomer Jeromie Whalen, U.S. representative Richard Neal has another challenger in the general election for Massachusetts first congressional district.
Nadia Milleron, who ran against Neal in 2024, is a lawyer and consumer advocate. She is hoping to unseat the 38-year incumbent to be the first independent woman to represent the western Mass region.
Milleron is hard to categorize, and that’s part of her platform. Some of her goals mirror traditional progressive campaigns. For example, she’d like the government to provide health care to everyone through a health care trust. As she explained at a televised debate on WWLP-TV earlier this month, “we would pay for the health care and not for the bloat of the insurance company. Save $1 trillion and 100,000 lives.”
Neal says he opposes that kind of single-payer system, in part because he says some people don’t want to change their current health insurance. He instead wants to shore up the Affordable Care Act, including reinstating the tax credits that the Trump administration eliminated.
“I'm for Medicare for all who want it,” he said. “The ACA has worked. Twenty-one million Americans have health insurance that didn't have it before.”
Milleron would also like to eliminate the federal income tax on people who make less than $100,000 a year, which Neal also opposes. He said he supports middle-and low income earners in other ways. For one, he wants to make the Covid-era child tax credit permanent.
“I have opposed the ‘big, beautiful bill’ that Trump offered as it related to tax cuts, because those tax cuts overwhelmingly went to the people at the very top of the income levels,” Neal said. “It is outrageous that those experiences are now harming people at the lower end of the economic spectrum.”
But Milleron said Neal’s many corporate donors have made him beholden to wealthy interests. She said her proposed income tax cut on middle-income earners could be easily funded if the IRS cracked down on unpaid corporate taxes.
“The IRS does not collect from top earners and corporate cheats, the income tax that they earn,” she said, adding that Neal could have pushed for that.
Milleron is a lawyer by training - and the niece of consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Milleron became active in politics after her daughter died in a Boeing airplane crash in 2019. She has fought for better aviation safety and said she’s using the legal settlement her family received from Boeing to fund her campaign.
“It gives me the opportunity to run,” she said. “On the other hand, Mr. Neal is accepting PAC money."
Milleron wears a religious cross in public and said her faith informs her political work, but she also maintained that she would not oppose abortion, LGBTQ rights, or same-sex marriage.
“I abide by the tenets of my faith as best as I can, and I fall down. But it does not have to do with me governing, and it doesn't mean that I judge other people for the way they do things," she said. "And everybody has the right to bodily autonomy, and everybody has the right to all health care services.”
One place where Milleron and Neal have differed, sometimes bitterly, is over which of them would fight the Republicans the hardest.
Milleron’s husband works in the Trump administration, and Neal has accused her of having ties to Trump’s MAGA movement, which she strongly denies. Milleron said she would vote to impeach Trump.
But Milleron also said she would caucus with whichever party has the majority in congress, in order to have the most leverage. She said she would threaten to withhold her vote from either party if that helped get her priorities through.
Meanwhile, Neal said, if the Democrats take back the U.S. House, as chair of the Ways and Means Committee, he would already have that leverage.
