Louanne McLeod is watching the 2026 midterm elections closely, but the Burlington resident’s eyes are mostly on races outside Vermont.
“It’s fear of the rest of the country,” McLeod said, in between bites of her veggie burger at a recent community dinner in Burlington’s Old North End.
She’s “hoping and praying” that voters in purple states will elect enough Democrats to flip control of Congress. But McLeod is the sort of Vermont Democrat who, in recent years at least, has thrown her support behind Republican incumbent Gov. Phil Scott.
“I have some questions about some of the things that have happened, but I’m not completely opposed to him,” McLeod said.
Watch Amanda Janoo and Aly Richards debate live on Vermont Edition Thursday at noon
This year, she’s open to supporting one of Scott’s two Democratic challengers, but, she said, “I have not received things telling me what their platform is, so I think I need to get more information.”
Aly Richards, the former CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, earned acclaim in nonprofit and legislative circles through her work lobbying for childcare funding. Amanda Janoo, an Oxford-trained economist who’s spent much of her career working internationally, is attracting voters hungry for an outsider promising structural change.
The two Democrats share a significant political liability: Most voters have no idea who they are, according to a recent University of New Hampshire poll. Even among likely Democratic primary voters, two-thirds said they weren’t familiar with the candidates.
“Nobody’s been paying attention to this primary,” Richards said. “Either there’s this idea that people don’t know that it’s happening, or people don’t think you can beat Phil. But I think that is changing now.”
Vermont’s five-term Republican incumbent has long been dubbed “the most popular governor in the country,” and he’s historically enjoyed as much or more support from Democrats than Republicans. But the same UNH poll suggested Scott’s popularity among voters may be waning.
The cost of housing and healthcare have nearly doubled under his decade-long tenure, and the high cost of living in Vermont has begun to elicit widespread disaffection among its residents.
The question in the 2026 midterms is whether Janoo or Richards can harness that alienation and persuade enough Scott voters that it’s time for something new.
‘This is what we’ve been waiting for’
On a recent sunny afternoon, Janoo sat at a picnic table outside the Brattleboro Food Co-op with about a dozen campaign volunteers.
Members of this group were putting up homemade lawn signs before Janoo had raised enough money to print professional ones. They regularly knock on doors and travel to public events to hand out fliers and spread the word.
“Since Bernie, I haven’t been as excited about a candidate until Amanda came on the scene,” Putney resident John Field said, referring to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I’ll drive an hour and half to go see Bernie speak, and I would drive an hour and half to go see Amanda speak, because it’s the same idea of — this is what we’ve been waiting for, and now we have it.”
Janoo, a 38-year-old Strafford native, is trying to convince voters that “a different political and economic system is possible.” And her campaign is, much like Sanders’, challenging the Democratic Party it’s affiliated with.
“I think we’re seeing in this moment that there is a reckoning and a choice that is being offered to the Democrats,” Janoo said at a candidate forum in late June. “And it’s whether we are going to continue to advance this corporate neoliberal bulls---, or if we’re really going to genuinely look at a different, more economically populist vision.”
Janoo has sought to sharpen her image as an outsider. In a fundraising text message in June, she called her primary opponent a “well-funded establishment candidate” — a characterization Richards rejects.
No aspect of Janoo’s platform has elicited more enthusiasm among her supporters than what she calls “free healthcare” — a publicly funded, universal program that would eliminate insurance for primary care. Her proposal would see the state pay doctors and other providers directly and, she said, usher “small-town doctors and nurses into our communities.” Janoo says it would be the first step in a longer-term push for a multi-state, single-payer system for all healthcare services.
The universal primary care program, according to Janoo’s estimates, would cost more than $300 million annually. She plans to finance it by raising income taxes. Her proposal, borrowed from modeling done by the Public Assets Institute, would raise about three times as much as the income-tax surcharge Democratic state lawmakers abandoned earlier this year. It relies on a 2% surcharge on income over $250,000, and an 8% surcharge on income over $500,000 — nearly double the current top marginal rate.
"Our country is being run by a bunch of sociopaths that are very hellbent on creating some sort of AI military dictatorship."Amanda Janoo, Democratic candidate for governor
Retired pediatrician Jane Katz Field said Janoo’s proposal is triggering the same groundswell that lifted Peter Shumlin to the governorship in 2010, when he made single-payer healthcare the hallmark of his Democratic campaign. Shumlin later abandoned the proposal, concluding it would have been prohibitively expensive.
“Everyone’s ready, but it’s kind of like, having Scott there, it’s just sopping everybody’s strength,” Katz Field said. “But the moment it can be liberated, I mean, there’s groups all over that are going to … support it.”
Janoo recently attended a backyard barbecue, hosted in her honor, on a quiet residential street on the outskirts of downtown Brattleboro. As guests dug into hot dogs, burgers and rice and beans, she spoke about her modest upbringing in Strafford, and the neighbor who, while she was still in the womb, dropped off a side of beef as her parents were recovering from a home foreclosure.
“That’s why (my mom) swears I’m so tall, because she’s like this tiny little lady,” Janoo said.
Janoo told the small gathering that she supports tax hikes on vacation homes and luxury rentals. She also wants to “redistribute” state resources and decision-making power back to municipalities, in the form of unrestricted block grants to towns. She said her platform is rooted in the belief that states are the “bulwark against authoritarianism and a living laboratory of democracy.”
To a crowd at a live podcast taping in Montpelier in June, she said, “Our country is being run by a bunch of sociopaths that are very hellbent on creating some sort of AI military dictatorship.”
‘Aly is being more real’
There were zero customers at the Morrisville Farmers Market when Aly Richards arrived for a campaign stop on a recent Saturday, so she talked up a couple vendors selling maple syrup.
“I guzzle maple syrup, I have to say,” she told them. “I put it in my hamburger meat. I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do that. It’s the secret ingredient.”
When Charles Cooley, owner of Jacob Brook Farm, asked Richards who she was running against in the primary, she told him about Janoo.
“She’s lovely. She’s very smart, and I hope we collaborate in the future,” Richards said. “But the truth is that I really don’t think that she has as much of a shot to beat Phil.”
General election viability has become a leading pitch for Richards, who, in a not-so-subtle reference to her primary opponent, says she “will not promise magical thinking.”
“I can’t do it,” Richards, a 40-year-old Newbury native, said in an interview. “I’ve been around the block in Vermont too long. I am the experienced candidate.”
She says she accrued that experience during her 10-year campaign for a 2023 childcare law, which established a new payroll tax to fund hundreds of millions of dollars in childcare subsidies. Scott vetoed the legislation, but lawmakers overrode him.
“I took my head up from a decade of working on the ground to solve this crisis … and I realized everything else we love in Vermont is on fire — housing, healthcare, education,” she said of her decision to run for governor.
Richards supports higher taxes on second homes and said she isn’t opposed in concept to raising income taxes on high earners. But she said she won’t commit to a proposal until she knows “who it is we’re taxing.”
“We don’t have tech bros here. We don’t have trillionaires here in Vermont,” Richards said.
She said she also supports universal primary care, but wants to maintain insurance as the primary funding mechanism, and have the state take over administration from providers.
"Amanda talks a good talk, but she hasn’t walked the walk. And Aly is being more real."Waterbury Rep. Theresa Wood
Janoo is attempting to ride a “broader national wave of anti-establishment candidates who have been able to take on entrenched incumbents,” according to her campaign spokesperson, Jeffrey Peterson. While Richards says she’s far from an establishment candidate, she said she also doesn’t think voters are looking for the progressive firebrands that have fared so well in fluorescent blue districts in New York City and Washington, D.C.
“I think that trying to paste this national mood over Vermont in a way that is not accurate doesn’t help the voters,” Richards said. “What am I? Progressive? Center? Democratic Socialist? No, I am Aly. I am a problem solver. … And I spent the last 10 years of my life as an organizer delivering a sacred plank of the progressive agenda in this country.”
As governor, Richards said, she would turn her focus next to housing and healthcare. She wants to boost technical assistance to municipalities that are struggling to leverage new housing development tools, and create a sales tax holiday for building materials. In healthcare, she supports reference-based pricing and “hospital transformation.”
She said deeper structural changes, however, will derive from a “Vermont Economic Action Plan” that she’ll develop once she’s in office.
“If you don’t know how to move things through the Legislature, even if they’re the best ideas in the world, Vermonters are still going to be in the same position they are today — not seeing a result delivered to them on the ground,” she said.
Waterbury Rep. Theresa Wood, the Democratic chair of the House Human Services Committee, knocked on strangers’ doors in Morrisville recently to encourage them to vote for Richards. During her 11 years in the Legislature, Wood said she hasn’t seen a more successful legislative campaign than the one Richards waged for childcare.
“And I think she has not only that kind of vision, but that sense of what to do and when to do it,” she said.
Wood said she’s “excited” to see “two strong, intelligent women” challenge Scott. She said she thinks Richards is the candidate who can win.
“Amanda talks a good talk, but she hasn’t walked the walk. And Aly is being more real,” Wood said. “She knows that healthcare is a giant issue in the state. She’s not making bold promises about a free-healthcare-for-all kind of thing, because she’s also pragmatic.”
‘It’s a vibes thing’
Janoo, a relative unknown in Vermont political circles before she announced her candidacy, has caught some longtime political observers by surprise. Alex MacLean, a lobbyist who managed Shumlin’s campaigns, said “she’s tapping into something real.”
“People are furious. They’re fed up with a government and an economic system that is no longer working for them. And the burn-it-down-and-start-over message that she has been espousing is a compelling one,” MacLean said.
While that message may resonate with the Democratic/Progressive base in a primary, MacLean said, she thinks general election voters will be more concerned with who can “govern under very real budget constraints.”
“Phil Scott’s strength has always been that he comes across as a nice, competent, results-oriented moderate,” she said. “And Aly can compete directly on that turf.”
Vermont is on pace to see its lowest-turnout primary in more than a decade, based on the number of early and absentee ballot requests tracked by the Vermont Secretary of State. And the candidates’ ability to connect with voters en masse in the closing weeks of the campaign will be constrained by financial limitations. According to their most recent campaign finance disclosures, filed July 1, Richards had raised $365,000 and had $131,000 cash on hand. Janoo had raised $245,000 and had $54,000 in the bank.
Natalie Silver, who managed U.S. Rep. Becca Balint’s campaign in 2022, said voters’ decisions in the Aug. 11 primary will “generally come down to, ‘Who have I met? Whose name can I remember? And did I like what they had to say?’”
“And that last part I think is so much less about ideology and policy prowess, especially in a primary … which is so much more about, do you feel a connection with that person?” Silver said. “It’s a vibes thing. It is truly a vibes thing.”
