Record 45% of US voters identify as independents, Gallup finds
Ralph Nader, the 92-year-old consumer advocate whose 2000 Green party presidential run many Democrats still blame for Al Gore’s loss, is pressing the party to replace its congressional leadership days before the US midterm elections. In a series of long phone calls with the Guardian, Nader said “The best thing that could happen for the Democrats is for [Senator Chuck] Schumer and [Hakeem] Jeffries to be voted out in January” — the party’s leaders in the Senate and House.
If Democrats win next week, Nader said, they need to be bold: prosecute corruption, restore the federal agencies that have been destroyed, and “really change things for the working class.” He said 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.”
The intervention comes as the issues that drove Nader to run in 2000 — a corporate plutocracy, a broken healthcare system, massive and widening inequality, cash-soaked elections, and voters struggling to pay their bills and disgusted with lawmakers — are front and center in the midterm campaign, and the Guardian reported that “this time, things are much, much worse.” Nader, from his home in northwest Washington, has watched the Trump administration dismantle the consumer and safety protections he helped build in the 1960s and 1970s, the outlet reported.
The Guardian reported that a series of progressive wins in the Democratic primaries and a flood of cash to Republicans has put everything from taxing billionaires to raising the minimum wage, “Medicare for all” and campaign finance reform on the table, and that even some of the left’s most moderate voices and a few Republicans agree it is time to rein in the power and influence of big business. Matt Bennett of the Third Way thinktank, which pushes moderate ideas, said Democrats “believe in regulated capitalism, and that we have overdone the capitalism and underdone the regulation.” He pointed to Elon Musk’s Republican donations — which the Guardian reported are now over $442m for the midterm elections — saying “the fact that we have a trillionaire who is trying to control American politics is pretty good evidence of that.”
Barry Lynn, director of the anti-monopoly Open Markets Institute, said tinkering around the edges will not be enough. “There’s a prairie fire rebellion taking place across America today,” Lynn said. “Tax policy is not enough. People want revolutionary change.”
Nader’s warnings carry the weight of a career that reshaped US consumer law. As a lawyer in his 30s working with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a labor department official, on auto safety, he wrote Unsafe At Any Speed, which blamed car design rather than what the industry called “the nut behind the wheel” for the high rate of US auto deaths. After he testified at a congressional hearing in 1966, General Motors hired private investigators to, as Nader later said, “obtain lurid details” about his private life. The episode prompted a public apology from GM’s then-president, James Roche, and Nader 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 airline safety, air quality and radiation from television sets.
That work left a trail of new laws and federal agencies in its wake, the Guardian reported, with one notable exception since: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), created by Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren after the 2008 financial crisis. Republicans, led by the Trump administration, have tried to destroy the CFPB for a decade and appear close to succeeding, the outlet reported. The shift reverses the Biden administration’s stepped-up enforcement of predatory practices, antitrust scrutiny of monopolies and advocacy for labor rights.
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, one of the groups Nader founded, said Nader’s successes came because of the energy in Congress and his 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.” “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 spending hit a record $5.13bn in 2025, a 250% increase from 1998, with trade groups representing industry, realtors and drug companies among the top donors, the Guardian reported. Weissman described the current landscape as “an administration that’s both carrying water for corporations and wrecking regulatory agencies, against the backdrop of a hostile court system.”
No one has emerged as an effective national champion of these causes in the way Nader was at his peak, when he appeared on magazine covers, topped most-trusted polls, showed up on Saturday Night Live and Phil Donahue’s talk show, and had the ear of presidents, Congress and major news organizations, the Guardian reported. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, 85, ran presidential campaigns on these issues in 2016, and Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did in 2020. “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, president of the Groundwork Collaborative, a Washington research and policy group pushing new laws to curb algorithmic pricing and other pro-consumer moves.
Nader said even Sanders keeps his distance. “Bernie hasn’t called me back in 25 years,” Nader said. He recalled cornering Sanders in the Senate barbershop while the senator was getting a shave — “He couldn’t run away,” Nader said, adding that he grilled the senator about why he was not meeting with him or other public advocates and organizers. Nader said Sanders “doesn’t want to be associated with me because of the way they tainted me on 2000.”
The 2000 run was itself rooted in the issues now dominating the campaign. The Green party recruited Nader in 1996, dismayed in part by Democratic president Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, with the goal of crossing the 5% threshold for public funding and building a third party in a country two parties had dominated for more than 130 years. Theresa Amato, Nader’s two-time campaign manager, said 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.” Nader drew thousands of young people to massive rallies alongside Susan Sarandon, Patti Smith, Ani DiFranco and Eddie Vedder. Republicans and Democrats had cozied up to corporate power so completely that citizens and citizens groups like the ones he founded could no longer do much, 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 had started the run promising not to campaign in swing states that could cost Gore the election, but changed his mind after being blocked from the presidential debate — a decision filmmaker Michael Moore, a Nader supporter, recalled in a 2020 podcast as the moment “things went awry for Ralph.” Amato said there was “an immense amount of pressure” to drop out in late 2000, but that Nader believed “we could not abandon our supporters, all the volunteers and donors, and the embryonic US Green party.” The party won less than 3% of the popular vote. In Florida, Nader received nearly 100,000 votes; after the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision halted a recount, George W. Bush held 537 more votes, giving him Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the presidency. Gore did not win his home state of Tennessee, the Reform party’s Patrick Buchanan drew nearly 17,500 Florida votes, and Stanford University researchers found that Palm Beach County’s “butterfly ballot” caused more than 2,000 Gore voters to vote for Buchanan by mistake.
Nader said Gore later sent him a letter absolving him of responsibility for the outcome; Gore declined requests for an interview, with a spokesperson saying he was “overbooked.” The aftermath made Nader an outcast. “He was no longer invited onto talk shows, he wasn’t invited to anything. He was a pariah,” Moore said. Steve Skrovan, producer of the 2006 documentary An Unreasonable Man, said Nader “played a very steep reputational price for being the Cassandra” of the situation the US is in now, and that 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.”
Nader remains unapologetic. “The Democrats are scapegoaters on steroids,” he said, arguing the party never looked at itself in the mirror and asked how it failed to defeat “this bumbling governor from Texas with a horrible record who couldn’t string three sentences together.” He made the same argument about 2016, when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton: “Imagine blaming Jill Stein, who got a few votes in Pennsylvania,” he said of the Green party candidate who won 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.”
The Guardian reported that the election that unexpectedly put Bush in power set off a fresh round of corporate tax cuts and deregulation, as well as the Iraq war, and that some liberals see the outcome as a turning point marking the death of bipartisanship and the politicization of the Supreme Court. The race was also a pivotal moment for Democratic finances: the New York Times wrote in 1999 that Tony Coelho, placed at the head of Gore’s campaign, “revolutionized the party, placing fundraising above ideology as the Democratic credo,” and corporate donations to both parties have skyrocketed since, boosted by the 2010 Citizens United ruling.
Taxing the wealthy and making companies treat their workers and customers better are highly popular with voters, the Guardian reported. Republicans crafted a long-term plan to use non-economic ideas to drive wedges into the coalition that passed reforms supporting those 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, some progressive strategists believe, Democrats are going to have to turn against their donors and brave an onslaught of lobbying and campaign cash against them — and that it is about time they did.
“You spent a generation cozying up to these guys, and there’s no middle class anymore,” said Dan Geldon, Elizabeth 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 Americans want either party, the Guardian reported. The percentage of US voters who consider themselves independent hit a record 45% in late 2025, Gallup polling shows; for Gen Z voters, born between 1997 and 2007, the figure is a record 56%, up from 40% for voters of the same age in 1992. In Nebraska, Dan Osborn, an independent Senate candidate and union leader who 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, said he is running because “it’s all about standing up for the little guy, and I didn’t see anybody doing that.” “Workers need rights and representation in this world,” Osborn said. “Otherwise, they’ll work you to death and not pay hardly anything.” Osborn lost to Republican incumbent Deb Fischer in 2024 and trails Pete Ricketts, a Republican whose father is a billionaire; the Guardian reported Ricketts holds a slight lead in the polls.
Nader, who backed an impeachment seminar in July and predicted Trump could step down this month, has been calling progressive candidates directly, including Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson, to present a policy plan he says would guarantee their midterm success as money pours into Republican opponents. The agenda: higher wages, universal health insurance, putting “corporate crooks” in jail and impeaching Trump. “The better their agenda, the less money they need,” he said. He is not optimistic about big changes if Democrats win both houses of Congress. “They’ll break open the champagne and go back to business as normal and start raising more money for 2028,” he predicted. “I can predict ‘em like you predict the sun coming up every morning.”
Nader said he has not given up. Asked decades ago what would cause the end of the world, he said his answer was “science and technology in the hands of giant corporations and dictatorships.” “We’re right on track,” he said. He suggested a popular podcaster like Joe Rogan could jumpstart the movement — though he has not been able to reach Rogan — and argued citizens still have the power to organize and demand Congress pass something revolutionary like universal healthcare. “It’s still ‘We the people’ in the Constitution. It’s not ‘We the Congress’ or ‘We the Corporation,’” he said. All that is needed, he said, is “the people to just get off their ass.”