SPRINGFIELD — Just as Nadia Milleron began to address the press on a recent afternoon, standing in front of bright yellow banners that read “Nadia Milleron for Congress,” the bells of the Springfield Courthouse rang out, as if announcing her campaign to the city.

Milleron, a mother, lawyer, farmer and niece of famed Ralph Nader, opposes 18-term politician Richard Neal in the race for the 1st Congressional District seat in Congress. It’s an uphill battle, especially when 30% of voters in the 83-municipality district don’t know Milleron’s on the ballot and Neal has had a 35-year career in Washington.

“This is a word-of-mouth campaign,” said Milleron, 60, of Sheffield. “About 30% of the voters don’t know that I’m on the ballot, and so the only way they’re going to know is if people who are informed tell other people.”

She’s also doing her part to spread the word about her campaign by visiting almost every city and town in the district, a sign that said shows a candidate who is willing to come to them.

“We just need to go and do town halls in their towns and collect their concerns,” Milleron said. “What Richard Neal says about town hall meetings is it brings out the screamers. They’re screaming because they’re frustrated about being unheard.”

Milleron has faced similar political feats in the past when she advocated for 157 families who lost their loved ones when a Boeing 737 Max 8 jet crashed in Ethopia in March 2019. Milleron’s daughter, 23-year-old Samya Stumo, was on the plane that went down.

Despite grieving one of the greatest losses of her life — the other was the death of her 9-year-old son to cancer — Million lead the fight for aviation safety. She filed a wrongful death lawsuit with the other family members, lobbied in favor of the Aircraft Certification Safety and Accountability Act and authored legislation in Illinois, where Boeing headquarters at the time, that requires punitive damages for wrongful death lawsuits against corporations.

It was lobbying for the latter legislation where Milleron learned how to fight for people. She recalls one legislator who told her that his district doesn’t care about aviation safety. In response, Milleron knocked on every door in his district and asked constituents to urge the legislator to back her bill. Within three days, she got 120 people to tell him they too want punitive damages from corporations.

“When he saw me in the halls of the legislature, he screamed at me and told me he needed a restraining order against me, but eventually, as the legislation progressed, he voted for it,” Milleron said. “Ultimately, this is good for his district.”

While Neal’s campaign focuses on what he’s already done, Million’s campaign revolves around what she will do for the district: bring in more manufacturing jobs, expand access to health care by addressing the shortage of medical professionals and combating the opioid crisis.

“I was looking for issues that affect the quality of life in our district, that I could move in a bipartisan way, and that is the same as aviation safety,” Milleron said.

Her main concern is to bring back manufacturing jobs to the district, particularly in agricultural and pharmaceutical sectors. She said that a healthy economy includes 15% manufacturing jobs, but the district’s number of manufacturing jobs is under 7%.

“People are doing three service jobs to try to make up for having a good job,” Milleron said. “Their child care has to get moved around all the time because their schedules get moved around all the time, and they don’t have benefits. It’s just not adequate to build your family, to build your community, to achieve the American dream with three service jobs.”

The prevalence of opioids, particularly fentanyl, kills hundreds of people in the rural areas of the district, including 400 people in Berkshire County during the last two years alone, Milleron said. She’s concerned that private mail carriers, like UPS and FedEx, don’t check the contents of packages under $800, and that simply requiring all packages entering the United States to undergo some inspection by human, dog or robot could prevent this loss.

Above all, Milleron wants to be the representative who will fight for the needs of the people, the representative she wished she had when she grieved the loss of her daughter.

“I am his (Neal’s) constituent who needed help,” Milleron said. “It’s just the fact that there’s no Republican, there’s no Independent, there’s no Democrat that’s running against Richard Neal, and the level of service that the office is giving the district is unacceptable.”

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.