Few Vermonters had heard of Amanda Janoo when she posted a 51-second video on social media in March announcing her candidacy for governor.
But her foray into statewide politics had been decades in the making, according to family members and longtime friends.
“I cannot emphasize enough how long she’s been talking about this. And truly, specifically, being the governor of Vermont,” said Lara Avery, who attended Macalester College with Janoo in the early 2000s.
Janoo’s mother, Judith Janoo, says her daughter’s gubernatorial aspirations date all the way back to grade school.
“She would say that as a kid,” Judith Janoo recalled recently. “She would say, ‘I want to be the governor of Vermont.’”
And serving as chief executive of the state isn’t even the 39-year-old Strafford native’s loftiest ambition. The Cambridge-trained economist spent much of her career working on industrial policy reform in developing countries. She’s since become a leading voice in what’s known as the “wellbeing economy” — a global movement to prioritize public health, the environment and quality of life over economic growth.
“I feel like my purpose in life, or what I hope to achieve, is to transform the global economic system,” Janoo said in an interview last year, before she announced her candidacy.
These twin goals — governing Vermont and remaking the global economic order — are symbiotic for Janoo. The country’s founders, she often says, designed states to be “living laboratories of democracy.” She’s convinced that Vermont-based experiments in housing, healthcare and education can create models for the rest of the world to replicate.
Critics say her ambition outstrips her resume. Janoo has never held public office beyond justice of the peace in Burlington. She’s never worked inside the executive branch she now wants to lead.
“You’re seeing someone who is well spoken, who is well educated, but doesn’t have governmental experience in any way, shape or form, winding up being at the top of the ticket for the Democratic Party,” said Matt Birong, the Democratic chair of the House Government Operations Committee, who currently works on the campaign of Republican Lt. Gov. John Rodgers.
Other Democrats have questioned the viability of her platform.
For the dedicated supporters who’ve propelled a political unknown to within striking distance of Republican Gov. Phil Scott, however, her outsider status and her bold agenda are assets. And Janoo’s capacity to connect so viscerally with so many voters distinguishes her from Scott’s previous challengers.
“I think Amanda Janoo walks on water,” said Mary Sullivan, a former Democratic lawmaker from Burlington. “The first time I met her, I was like, she’s a gift to Vermont. This is unbelievable.”
Janoo, a Democrat/Progressive, said the economic crises ailing Vermont suggest it's time for a leader with a different set of skills. She said she’s spent her career working on economic reforms in governments across the world. And she said she’ll assemble a team of executive branch leaders who can administer the “bold economic and system change” she’s called for.
“I'm not interested in being a dictator,” she told Vermont Public. “I'm interested in surrounding myself with people who are smarter than me, with network weavers who can connect people and ideas, and trusting the people inside government and across our communities who have the knowledge and experience to make change happen.”
Know before you vote
Get roundups of our latest Vermont election coverage in your inbox.
‘A natural leader’
Janoo says her politics reflect values instilled during her upbringing in Strafford, where the small Orange County community took care of its own.
“Growing up in rural Vermont, you realize that strong communities aren’t built by billionaires or big investors, they're really built by the people who know how to build what’s needed, who know how to fix what’s broken,” she said last month.
Her platform includes property-tax hikes on wealthy out-of-staters and income-tax increases on Vermont’s highest earners. Vermont already has the financial resources to meet its residents’ basic needs, Janoo insists. It just needs tax and other policy reforms to redistribute that wealth to fund things like universal primary healthcare, and lower taxes and housing costs for working-class residents.
Judith Janoo said her daughter’s populist vision had already come into focus by the time she was a teenager.
“She knew she wanted to work in economics, but not a regular trickle-down corporate economics,” Judith Janoo said. “She knew that in high school. She knew she wanted to do something that would help people, and that’s where she felt she could do the most good.”
Janoo was the youngest of three siblings in a family that, according to her sister, prized education.
“We didn’t have a lot, but education was always very, very important to them, the power of knowledge and the opportunities that come from it,” Janoo’s sister, Angela Janoo, said of their parents.
Janoo’s father was an engineer from Malaysia, and her mother, born and raised in Maine, took various jobs as a bookkeeper. While the biracial family might have stood out in rural Vermont, Angela Janoo said race was never a focal point of their identity.
“We really didn’t talk about it much. It was just our normal,” she said. “You would think that it would be more with the demographic in Vermont the way it is, but it really wasn’t.”
The Janoos homeschooled their daughter until sixth grade, primarily as a way to maximize time with her dad, who traveled frequently for work, according to Judith. She said the arrangement also allowed for “exploratory” learning that involved trips to town meeting and other community events.
“She helped at senior meal sites with me. We sang at nursing homes,” Judith Janoo recalled.
Janoo went on to attend the Newton School, in Strafford, and Hanover High School in New Hampshire, where tuition is publicly funded for students from Strafford.
Janoo said her father, who died in 2008, was strict. When she brought her first boyfriend to the house for the first time, Janoo recalled, Vincent Janoo was sitting in a chair on the front porch, sharpening a machete.
“I’d never seen that machete in my life. He, like, went up to the attic and brought it down,” she recalled.
According to her boyfriend, “He just grilled this kid about his plans for the future.”
“He asked him, ‘Do you believe in God?’ I was so humiliated,” Janoo said. “But then, anytime this boyfriend was being a jerk, I would just be like, ‘I’m going to tell my dad.’ And he was like, ‘No, I’m so sorry.’ So actually it was pretty useful.”
Judith Janoo said she and her husband also gave their children room to roam. Janoo spent a semester in high school at the John Woolman School, a private Quaker boarding school in Nevada City, California, where students take courses on peace studies and social justice.
The school gave Janoo a scholarship that covered half the cost; Judith Janoo said she and her daughter held bake sales to fundraise the rest.
She also participated in Model United Nations, where students assume roles as delegates for different countries to solve global dilemmas. Judith Janoo said those experiences helped crystalize the concepts of justice, fairness and equity that her daughter had been mulling intuitively since she was a little girl.
“I question myself — how was she so focused on what she wanted to do?” she said. “That we didn’t raise into her, and her brother and sister were not like that. That was a quality of hers — she just knew what she wanted to do.”
Janoo applied to the one college she wanted to attend, Macalester College in Minnesota; Judith Janoo says her daughter enrolled at the expensive private institution with the help of work-study and need-based aid and loans.
"Wherever Mandy goes, people follow."Lara Avery, Amanda Janoo's classmate from Macalester College
Janoo met Lara Avery during freshman orientation and the two became fast friends.
“She’s such a natural leader, and I’m not just saying that as me advocating for her candidacy or whatever. But wherever Mandy goes, people follow,” Avery said.
Avery said the fundamental concepts Janoo talks about on the campaign trail are indistinguishable from the views she had in college.
“We would miss the parties because we would be sitting around pre-gaming and then get into a discussion about why economies should serve the people that are making them up rather than the people that are benefiting from them,” she said.
Party on the trail
Janoo’s campaign functions more like a touring musical act than a conventional political operation. She favors laidback gatherings at breweries and barns to more choreographed appearances for the donor class. She turned down an invitation to attend a Democratic Governors Association event in Washington, D.C., for instance, in favor of spending two days at the Tunbridge World's Fair.
At a recent stop at the Latchis Theater in Brattleboro, a five-person marching band trailed behind her as she greeted the scores of people who turned out to see her speak.
“MAGA’s got a culture. And right now the left is like, kind of a buzzkill,” Janoo told Vermont Public. “So how do we make it irresistible for us to want to be together and come together and be part of a movement for justice? And to try to connect the left and center enough that we have the critical mass that we need to achieve that kind of systemic change?”
Janoo is tall with long black hair and has an effortless affability that puts strangers at ease. At campaign events like the one in Brattleboro, she shares an only-in-Vermont origin story that begins with the town meetings her parents took her to when she was a child.
“Every year I would watch my community and my neighbors really like debate and dialogue and decide on everything from the very mundane, like how much money should go to grading the roads, to the really big questions, like whether or not we should have GMO labels on our food or nuclear reactors in our state,” she said. “And that was really my introduction to democracy.”
Janoo almost without fail begins her campaign appearances by asking people in the audience the same question that so endeared her to Brookfield resident Jackie Smith-Nielsen.
“She started our meet and greet by asking people what was going right in their communities,” Smith-Nielsen said, recalling an event in Randolph. “And it’s just such a refreshing change from all the grievance politics we hear everywhere else.”
Her approach has proven financially successful. Janoo had raised nearly $900,000 toward her campaign as of Oct. 15 —about $320,000 more than Phil Scott, despite her pledge not to accept money from businesses or corporations. About $150,000 of that sum has come from the more than 1,200 donors who’ve contributed less than $100.
‘She stood out’
Janoo got her bachelor's degree in political science at Macalester, studied at Oxford as an undergraduate, and went on to receive a master’s in philosophy in development studies from Cambridge in 2013, where she studied under the economist Ha-Joon Chang.
“In Cambridge you have lots of bright people, but she stood out,” Chang told Vermont Public.
"She was always thinking, ‘How do you make this work?'"Ha-Joon Chang, economist and former professor at the University of Cambridge
What made Janoo so memorable, Chang said, was her ability to marry the theoretical complexities of global industrial policy with the practical realities of implementing reforms.
“She was always thinking, ‘How do you make this work?’ It’s not enough to have a good theory. You have to first of all translate it into some kind of concrete policy proposal, but you also need to build a political coalition around it,” he said. “Maybe she was already, without realizing it, training herself on how to be a politician.”
Janoo would go on to work with organizations including the United Nations and African Development Bank in countries such as Myanmar, Mozambique, Ukraine and South Africa, where she collaborated with Philipp Neuerburg, then an employee at the U.N. Industrial Development Organization.
Their project, which began in 2013, examined corporate subsidies the South African government was using to stimulate its manufacturing sector. Janoo’s research into similar schemes in other countries, according to Neuerburg, revealed flaws in the government’s approach.
Not only would the companies have made similar investments absent state intervention, Janoo’s research suggested, they were also undermining government objectives, one of which was to create new jobs. Neuerburg said Janoo’s research showed that manufacturing companies were using government funding to purchase new equipment “that would make workers obsolete.”
“So there would actually be job losses rather than job gains,” he said. “I would like to believe that that has changed quite a bit the way the South African government looked at these type of programs, being a little bit more kind of careful about how to dish out money, to whom.”
Neuerburg said Janoo challenged the economic orthodoxy — that growth is always good — in ways that sometimes frustrated U.N. staffers and government officials.
“She went into quite a lot of confrontation,” he said.
From the world to Vermont
Janoo moved back to Vermont permanently in 2018 and began working for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, a global organization headquartered in the United Kingdom. WEAll paid her $106,000 in 2025 to serve as its “economics and policy lead.” The group, according to its founders, helps countries across the world develop new metrics for, and strategies to achieve, economic success.
WEAll Operations Lead Anna Chrysopoulou, who’s based in Greece, said Janoo spearheaded production of the organization’s “Policy Design Guide.”
“It gives governments and communities a practical process for defining what they want their economy to deliver,” Chrysopoulou told Vermont Public.
She said Janoo provided technical support to the government of Finland when it worked to adopt a national “economic action plan” in 2023.
“Her contribution was helping officials answer the difficult practical questions — how wellbeing goals shape real policy choices, how government agencies work across boundaries and how progress is assessed beyond economic growth,” Chrysopoulou said.
Janoo has also served as one of WEAll’s prominent public figures, speaking at forums and conferences around the world.
“We have to stop treating people and planet like they’re here to serve the economy and start treating the economy like it’s here to serve us,” Janoo said in a 2021 presentation to the Green European Foundation.
In recent years, Janoo worked to advance those economic principles in Vermont. She served on the board of a coalition — called Fund Vermont’s Future — that led the push in Montpelier for income-tax increases on Vermont’s highest earners.
That proposal now features prominently in her gubernatorial campaign, as a means of funding universal primary healthcare. Janoo says the program would cost at least $322 million annually. She wants to pay for it by increasing taxes on Vermont’s highest earners — in June, she told Vermont Public she favored a surcharge of 8% on income above $500,000; in July, she said 6%.
Art Woolf, a retired University of Vermont economics professor who served as state economist under former Gov. Madeleine Kunin, said the proposal exposes fallacies in a platform that is “way outside the mainstream of economics.”
He said it’s still unclear to him how she plans to translate theory into practice.
“There so much in there of these grandiose schemes that it’s really hard to figure out how you would do them in terms of actually setting them out,” Woolf said. “And I doubt most of them would work.”
Woolf said an income-tax increase of the scale Janoo has proposed would send Vermont’s top marginal income tax rate to between 14% and 16% — well above any other state in the country.
“And then the question is, do those people leave? Do people not come to Vermont because of that? Especially because those are the kind of people you want to come — highly educated, high-income people,” he said.
Woolf said Janoo’s proposal also has the potential to dramatically increase demand for, and therefore the cost of, primary care.
Janoo’s economic principles have guided her to other politically thorny positions. For example, she pledged in late August to do “anything I can do legally as governor” to get the Vermont Air National Guard’s fleet of F-35 fighter jets “out of our skies.”
“It’s clear that certain kinds of work or industries or activities are contributing more to our communities and our natural environment, and others are more extractive or destructive,” she later told Vermont Public. “And I would say the military industrial complex is definitely one that is designed by definition to be destructive.”
Janoo said the booming military economy exists because the government created market demand for sophisticated weaponry. In the wellbeing economy, she said, government would instead create markets for things like watershed restoration.
“And so there is a power that I think the government has in also trying to build other types of sectors or activities or jobs in this moment as well,” Janoo said.
Scott, who until recently had little to say about his Democratic opponent, says her position on the F-35s casts her to the political fringe. He noted that Sens. Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch, as well as former Gov. Peter Shumlin, have all supported the Air National Guard mission in Burlington. The organization provides more than 1,000 direct jobs and $60 million in pay and benefits, he said in a campaign release.
“In the hours after the 9/11 attacks, it was the Vermont Air National Guard securing the airspace above,” Scott said. “Amanda Janoo's opposition to the Air National Guard sets her apart from most Democrats, independents and Republicans.”
Jon Erickson, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Vermont, said the “wellbeing economy” is a relatively new term for a decades-old movement.
“It really starts with, What’s better for society? Instead of, What’s best for the individual?” Erickson said. “Yes, we’re the richest country in the world in terms of the size of our economy. But we perform horribly on health statistics, on life satisfaction surveys, on every measurement that says what it means to live the good life.”
Erickson sees Janoo as part of a broader phenomenon embodied by young candidates such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
“We’re starting to see this progressive wave of a kind of new group of political candidates that … would argue for a different kind of economics and a different kind of economic system,” he said.
‘People want change’
Janoo’s platform has met with skepticism among fellow Democrats, some of whom privately worry that her presence at the top of the statewide ticket will be a drag on candidates for House and Senate.
Aly Richards, who lost to Janoo in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, pledged to support her rival in the general election. During Richards’ campaign, however, she intimated or said outright that many of Janoo’s proposals — her primary care funding plan among them — were too far afield even for the Democratically controlled House and Senate.
“The Legislature will not pass that,” she warned in a July debate on Vermont Edition.
Birong, the Democratic representative from Vergennes, said Janoo’s primary victory was a kind of jump-the-shark moment for the Vermont Democratic Party.
“She ran on a platform that 10 years ago would have, in my humble opinion, looked like the left-leaning side of the Progressive Party’s platform,” he said.
Birong was a Vermont delegate for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run. He said he hasn’t lost faith in the promise of proposals like “Medicare for All,” or aggressively taxing and regulating large corporations and billionaires. But he said the progressive left’s “activist” mindset in Vermont has transposed those views onto a state-level context that isn’t at all conducive to such structural reforms.
“We’re the population of, like, three neighborhoods in Brooklyn,” Birong said. “We structurally and internally don’t have the financial capacity, and even the ability within our government agencies and employee structure, to really build out a lot of those conversations functionally.”
Not all old-guard Democrats share Birong’s skepticism. Former Gov. Howard Dean, who endorsed Richards in the primary, said he’s been “very impressed by Amanda.”
“I think people want change, and I think they’re tired of the same old, same old,” Dean said.
Welch and U.S. Rep. Becca Balint endorsed Janoo in September. Earlier this month, Sanders waded into his home state’s gubernatorial politics for the first time in six years, and also endorsed Janoo.
“I personally like Phil Scott and I’ve worked with the governor on a number of issues over the years,” Sanders said. “But I believe it’s time for a change, time for new leadership, time for a kind of energy and bold ideas that we’re not seeing in Montpelier right now.” ■
