The first Democrat seeking to challenge Phil Scott for governor made it official on Tuesday.
Amanda Janoo, an economist and South Strafford native who now lives in Burlington, announced her candidacy with a press release and video outlining her vision for the state.
“My name is Amanda Janoo, and I’m running or governor because I refuse to accept that collapse is inevitable, or that the best a governor can do is manage decline,” Janoo says in the video.
Janoo acknowledged to Seven Days last month that she was considering a run but had yet to make a decision.
Other potential Democratic candidates for governor, including Treasurer Mike Pieciak and University of Vermont Medical Center board chair Aly Richards, have yet to make their plans public.
Janoo announced her candidacy on Tuesday morning in a press release and she said would follow up with campaign events in Strafford at 5 p.m. and in Burlington on March 14. The release said Janoo launched the campaign with “a bold vision in which all Vermonters can afford to live, go to school, go to the doctor, raise their family, feel safe, and pursue their dreams in this beautiful place we call home.”
She plans to seek the Democratic and Progressive party nominations.
Janoo is cofounder of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance of Vermont, a coalition of social and economic justice groups. She has studied economics at the University of Cambridge and worked on international economic develop initiatives, including at the United Nations.
Future generations, her video says, will remember the present as a time when Vermonters stood up to protect people’s rights, health care, small schools and businesses — and to make the state’s real estate market affordable instead of a “playground for investors and rich out of staters.”
“When they told us to accept our fate, dictated by corporations and corrupt politicians,” she says over footage of Donald Trump seated at a table with billionaires, “we gathered in our town meeting halls to find our vision of the future and showed them what true democracy looks like.”
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