Ralph Nader listens during a news conference on 2 July 2012 at Public Citizen in Washington DC.

Nader right about (almost) everything? His challenge to Democrats ahead of the midterm elections Heather Timmons in Washington‘Really change things for the working class,’ the ex-presidential candidate says A corporate plutocracy. A broken healthcare system. Massive and widening inequality. Cash-soaked elections. Angry people struggling to pay their bills and disgusted with lawmakers in Washington DC Nearly everything that pushed famed consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader to launch the 2000 presidential run that made him a political pariah in Washington is front and center as the US gears up for the 2026 midterm elections. But this time, things are much, much worse.

Nader, now 92, has been seething from his home in northwest Washington as the Trump administration rips the guts out of the hard-fought consumer and safety protections he built in the 1960s and 1970s. He’s once again calling for a revolution in a Democratic party that still wants nothing to do with him.

“The best thing that could happen for the Democrats is for [Senator Chuck] Schumer and [Hakeem] Jeffries to be voted out in January,” Nader told the Guardian during one of several long phone calls, speaking of the Democratic leaders in both houses of Congress.

If Democrats win next week, they need to be bold to fix the country, Nader said: prosecute corruption, restore the federal agencies that have been destroyed, and really change things for the working class. He doubts Schumer and Jeffries will do it.

“You think they’re going to have that kind of energy and courage?”Nader said. “They have no stomach for that. They’re going to drag the Democratic party down. People want justice.”As Democrats and their allies seek to defeat Trumpism and restore the US’s teetering democracy, it would be easy to dismiss Nader as a tragic footnote amid the current chaos: the man, although he and his allies vehemently disagree, whose run as a Green party presidential candidate cost Al Gore the presidency and left George W Bush in control.

Ralph Nader addresses supporters as his mother Rose Nader looks on after his arrival at the National Press Club in Washington DC on 7 November 2000.

But the ideas he’s preached for decades, rooted in the New Deal ideals that built the US into an economic powerhouse, are front and center in the midterms and beyond, after a failure to address the woes of working-class Americans opened the door to Trumpism.

For Nader, and many others, the central question is: does anyone in US politics have the fight to fix what’s wrong?

A series of progressive wins in the Democratic primaries and a flood of cash to Republicans has put everything on the table from taxing billionaires to raising minimum wage to ‘Medicare for all’ to campaign finance reform. Even the left’s most moderating voices and a few Republicans agree it’s time to rein in the power and influence of big business.

Democrats “believe in regulated capitalism, and that we have overdone the capitalism and underdone the regulation”, said Matt Bennett, whose Third Way thinktank pushes moderate ideas. “The fact that we have a trillionaire who is trying to control American politics is pretty good evidence of that,” he added, speaking of Elon Musk’s Republican donations – now over $442m for the midterm elections. Tinkering around the edges won’t be enough, many believe.

“There’s a prairie fire rebellion taking place across America today,” said Barry Lynn, director of the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly thinktank in Washington. “Tax policy is not enough,” he said. “People want revolutionary change.”The last pro-regulation era Ralph Nader, speaking as an auto safety critic, appears in 1966 before the Senate commerce subcommittee, which is investigating charges by Nader that he was harassed and intimidated by General Motors because of a book he had written critical of the automobile makers. Earlier, the GM president, James M Roche, apologized for his firm’s investigation of Nader.

Photograph: Bettmann Archive As a lawyer in his 30s working with political heavyweight Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a labor department official, on auto safety, Nader was thrust into the national spotlight after he wrote “Unsafe At Any Speed” that blamed car design instead of what the industry used to call “the nut behind the wheel” for the high rate of US auto deaths.

After he appeared before a congressional hearing in 1966 to testify about his findings, General Motors hired private investigators to, as Nader later said, “obtain lurid details” about his private life.

When the sting was reported, the then GM’s president, James Roche, publicly apologized and Nader sued. He used the $425,000 invasion of privacy settlement as seed money to build a team of hundreds of lawyers, dubbed “Nader’s Raiders” who investigated everything from airline safety to air quality to the radiation being emitted from television sets, and left a trail of new laws and federal agencies in their wake.

Big business hasn’t faced as much pushback in the United States since, with the notable exception of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) created by Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren after Wall Street created the 2008 financial crisis.

Republicans, led by the Trump administration have been trying to destroy the CFPB for a decade and appear to be close to succeeding After Joe Biden’s administration stepped up enforcement of predatory practices, reexamined monopolies, and championed labor rights, Trump’s White House has gone the opposite direction.

What Nader was able to do during the 1960s and 1970s isn’t going to work today. New rules for how businesses should act happened because of the energy in Congress then and Nader’s ability “to create an advocacy model and push through a lot of legislation and policy where business wasn’t ready for it and the times were demanding it”, explains Robert Weissman, the co-president of Public Citizen, one of groups Nader founded.

“The problem now is the times demand it and people want it but business is organized against it,” Weissman said. “It’s not that we’re not trying hard enough. There’s a different kind of pushback.”Federal lobbying, or money businesses and other groups spend trying to influence policy set in Washington hit a record of $5.13bn in 2025 a 250% increase from 1998. Trade groups representing industry, realtors and drug companies are top donors At the same time, “we’re dealing with an administration that’s both carrying water for corporations and wrecking regulatory agencies, against the backdrop of a hostile court system,” Weissman said.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders ran presidential campaigns on these issues in 2016 and Sanders and Warren in 2020. But no one has become an effective national champion for them in the way Nader did at his zenith. He was plastered on magazine covers and topped most-trusted polls, appeared on Saturday Night Live and Phil Donahue’s talk show, and had the ear of presidents, Congress and major news organizations.

Bill Murray and Ralph Nader during the Weekend Update sketch on 15 March 1980.

Photograph: NBC via Getty Images“It’s almost infuriating that we don’t have somebody helming a consumer movement in this country given how central these issues are to the national conversation,” said Lindsay Owens, the president of Groundwork Collaborative, a Washington research and policy group pushing new laws to curb algorithmic pricing and other pro-consumer moves.

And no, Sanders, 85, doesn’t want to talk to him either. “Bernie hasn’t called me back in 25 years,” Nader said.

Nader once cornered Sanders in the Senate barbershop while the senator was getting a shave. “He couldn’t run away,” Nader recalled, so he grilled him about why the senator wasn’t meeting with him or other public advocates and organizers. “Look, he doesn’t want to be associated with me because of the way they tainted me on 2000,” he said.

Nader remains undeterred. He backed an impeachment seminar in July and predicted Trump could step down this month. Recently, he has been dialing progressive candidates including Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson directly, to present his policy plan he thinks would guarantee their midterm success even as money pours into Republican opponents. On the agenda: higher wages, universal health insurance, putting “corporate crooks” in jail and impeaching Trump. “The better their agenda, the less money they need” to win, he said.

Nader’s not optimistic about big changes if Democrats win both houses of Congress, however. “They’ll break open the champagne and go back to business as normal and start raising more money for 2028,” he predicts. “I can predict ‘em like you predict the sun coming up every morning,” he added.

Things go awry The 2000 presidential election that unexpectedly put Bush into power catapulted the country into a fresh round of corporate tax cuts and deregulation, as well as the disastrous Iraq war. Some liberals point to it as a turning point, marking the death of bipartisanship and politicalization of the supreme court.

Nader was first recruited to run for president in 1996 by a Green party dismayed by, among other things, Democratic president Bill Clinton’s welfare reform. The goal was to capture enough of the popular vote to cross the 5% threshold for a public funding grant in the next election, ushering in a new era of three-party politics in a country dominated by two for over 130 years.

Republicans and Democrats had cozied up to corporate power so completely that citizens and citizens groups like the ones he founded couldn’t do much any more, Nader said. “King Corporation rules in Washington DC,” he said in a May 2000 speech“We have a government of the Exxon’s, by the General Motors, for the DuPonts.”“He wanted to get his message out but he also wanted to help the Green party get 5% of the vote so they could build as an organization,” said two-time former campaign manager Theresa Amato, a lawyer and public advocate.

A precursor to Sanders’ presidential campaign, Nader drew thousands of young people in massive rallies. He was joined onstage by celebrities including Susan Sarandon, Patti Smith, Ani DiFranco and Eddie Vedder.

He started his run promising not to campaign in swing states that could have cost Gore the election, but changed his mind after he was blocked from the presidential debate, filmmaker Michael Moore, a Nader supporter, recalled in a 2020 podcast“That’s when things went awry for Ralph,” he believes.

Stepping aside wasn’t an option. “There was an immense amount of pressure” to exit the race in late 2000, Amato said. “Nader’s view was that we could not abandon our supporters, all the volunteers and donors, and the embryonic US Green party, that had mobilized for the campaign and just drop out at the last minute.”While 2000 was its most successful year, the Green party eked out less than 3% of the popular vote. In Florida, Nader got nearly 100,000 votes. When a halted a recount in the state, Bush had 537 more votes, giving him Florida’s 25 electoral college votes and the presidency.

Actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins lead a Nader 2000 Citizens Committee rally in support of Green party presidential candidate Ralph Nader on 25 September 2000 on the steps of city hall in New York City.

Gore didn’t even win his home state Tennessee (Bill Clinton won there twice). Other third party candidates and a faulty ballot likely played a role. Patrick Buchanan’s ‘Reform party’ got nearly 17,500 in Florida; Stanford University researchers found Palm Beach County’s confusingly designed “butterfly ballot” caused more than 2,000 Gore voters to vote by mistake for Buchanan there alone. At one point, Gore sent him a letter, Nader recalls, absolving him of responsibility. Gore declined several requests for an interview. He is “overbooked”, a spokesperson said.

Nader was suddenly an outcast. “He was no longer invited onto talk shows, he wasn’t invited to anything. He was a pariah,” Moore explained.

That hasn’t changed as the economic red flags he warned about proved true. Nader “played a very steep reputational price for being the Cassandra” of the situation the US is in now, said Steve Skrovan, producer of “An Unreasonable Man,” a 2006 documentary about Nader and the 2000 presidential election.

Today’s corporate overreach “would not have happened had the so-called ‘opposition party’ not ceded the ground for this through their own neglect and corporatization,” Skrovan said.

Nader remains unapologetic. “The Democrats are scapegoaters on steroids,” he said. “They never look at themselves in the mirror and say ‘How can we not have landslided this bumbling governor from Texas with a horrible record who couldn’t string three sentences together?,’” he said, referring to Bush.

They did it again in 2016, he added, when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. “Imagine blaming Jill Stein, who got a few votes in Pennsylvania,” he added, speaking of the Green party candidate who got 1% of the vote, running on a $15 minimum wage and guaranteed health care. “What if you picked up her agenda? You would have won in a landslide, you idiots.”

None of the above The 2000 election was a pivotal moment for the Democratic party’s finances too. That’s when Tony Coelho “revolutionized the party, placing fundraising above ideology as the Democratic credo”, the New York Times wrote in 1999 as he was placed at the head of Gore’s campaign.

In the years since, the amount of corporate donations for both Democrats and Republicans has skyrocketed. They got an extra boost from the 2010 Citizens United supreme court decision that allowed big business to openly back candidates.

Multiple line charts comparing donations across Presidential elections grouped by business, labor, ideological and other. Business eclipses donations at $6 billion by recent election cycles Taxing the wealthy and making companies treat their workers and customers better are highly popular with voters. Republicans crafted a long-term plan to use non-economic ideas to drive wedges into the coalition that passed reforms supporting these ideas in the first half of the 1900s, Pat Buchanan, a consultant to Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan explained in “An Unreasonable Man”.

“You did this with social, cultural issues. You carve off all their issues which do not conflict with your own…and keep hammering and hammering them,” Buchanan said.

To win votes on economic issues, Democrats are going to have to turn against their donors and brave an onslaught of lobbying and campaign cash against them. It’s about time, some progressive strategists believe.

“You spent a generation cozying up to these guys, and there’s no middle class anymore,” Dan Geldon, senator Warren’s former chief of staff, who worked on her 2020 campaign.

The Democratic party’s infighting and Trump’s recentering of the Republican party around white supremacy, a nationalist foreign policy and more power for companies and the wealthy come as fewer and fewer Americans want either party.

The percentage of US voters who consider themselves “independent” hit a record high of 45% in late 2025, Gallup polling shows For gen Z voters, born between 1997 and 2007, that figure is a record 56%, up from 40% for the same-aged voters in 1992. Then Ecology candidate Ralph Nader for the US presidency circa 1999.

“Workers need rights and representation in this world,” Dan Osborn, who is running for Senate from Nebraska as an independent, told the Guardian. “Otherwise, they’ll work you to death and not pay hardly anything,” he said. Osborn, a union leader, led a strike at Kellogg’s Nebraska plant after the company said it would offshore jobs and cut benefits while showering investors with stock buy-backs.

“To me, it’s all about standing up for the little guy, and I didn’t see anybody doing that,” he said, explaining why he is running. Osborn lost handily in 2024 to Republican incumbent Deb Fischer.

Going into the midterm election, he’s trailing Pete Ricketts, a Republican whose father is a billionaire. Going into the midterm election, Ricketts has a slight lead in the polls.

For his part, Nader has some more uncomfortable predictions. “Someone asked me decades ago, ‘What’s going to cause the end of the world?’ And my answer was science and technology in the hands of giant corporations and dictatorships’ “ Nader said. “We’re right on track.” He hasn’t given up.

Citizens still have the power to change everything, Nader said, by organizing themselves to demand Congress pass something revolutionary like universal healthcare. Maybe a popular podcaster like Joe Rogan could jumpstart the movement, he said. He hasn’t been able to get through to Rogan, though.

“It’s still ‘We the people’ in the Constitution. It’s not ‘We the Congress’ or ‘We the Corporation,’” Nader said. All we need is “the people to just get off their ass.”