Vermont · Governor

Who is running?

Amanda Janoo (Democratic), Phil Scott (Republican), Brian Judd (Independent), Dean Roy (no party recorded), June Goodband (no party recorded). The margin below is Amanda Janoo minus the other candidate in the main contest; the rest are on the ballot and not in it.

The race, in brief

Vermont elects its governor to a two-year term on November 3, 2026. The text describes Vermont as deeply blue at the federal and state levels and notes that Kamala Harris won it by a double-digit margin in 2024, making this the only Republican-held governorship in such a state. The state profile records a median age of 43.0, a college share of 0.4 and a white non-Hispanic share of 0.9.

Republican incumbent Phil Scott, governor since 2017, is seeking a sixth two-year term. He won his primary on August 11, 2026 with 98.5%. He won re-election in a landslide in 2024, and Morning Consult ranks him the most popular governor in the nation. The Democratic nominee is economist Amanda Janoo, who also has the Vermont Progressive Party alliance and won her primary with 49.1% to Aly Richards's 46.6%. June Goodband, Brian Judd and Dean Roy are also running.

Six raters list the race as R: the Cook Political Report (September 11, 2025), Decision Desk HQ (September 23, 2026), Fox News (July 23, 2026), Inside Elections (August 28, 2025), RealClearPolitics (September 25, 2026) and Sabato's Crystal Ball (September 29, 2026). Silver Bulletin lists it as Tossup (September 25, 2026). Braun Research/Vermont Public (September 10–21, 2026) had Scott 44%, Janoo 34% among likely voters; the University of New Hampshire poll of September 17–21, 2026 is listed as Scott 43%, Janoo 49%.

A paragraph quoting a model forecast from the day this brief was written is omitted; the current forecast is at the top of this page.

The facts, each beside its sentence

Not in the source: The facts list Phil Scott with incumbent: false, but the text calls him the Republican incumbent; the facts flag looks wrong.; No vote shares or margins are given for Scott's past elections, only 'landslide' and 'increasingly wider margins'.; No fundraising figures in the text.; The facts' forecast rows carry no basis, so it is not known whether the model used the four state polls in the text.; The name of the 1.5% Republican primary candidate is not given.

Read from the district's section of Wikipedia's state page (CC BY-SA), archived as 763a3b9d34b2; written by claude-fable-5-1 (batch reader) on 2026-09-30 and checked mechanically: every quote occurs verbatim in the archived text, every number in the brief occurs in the inputs. No probability here is the reader's.

How it has voted for president

A shift of 2.4 points toward the Democrats from 2016 to 2024. county returns summed; MEDSL county file (2016), an MIT-licensed county file (2020, checked against certified state results) and MEDSL precinct returns (2024). For a district split across counties this is an estimate, and where the state published the exact 2024 figure for these lines, that exact figure is the one the model uses.

The state in numbers

ACS 5-year state tables; BLS county unemployment and BEA county income, transfers and jobs summed to the state. Every figure is a named column of a named public-domain table, archived before it was read.

Who is ahead, and by how much?

Two numbers because they answer two questions. The nowcast is where opinion stands; the election-day forecast is where it is likely to end up.

How likely is each to win?

Monte Carlo error is ±0.1 points. A change smaller than that is simulation noise rather than news, and this page will not describe it as movement.

How wide is the range?

Nowcast: 90% of simulations fall between -33.8 and +1.5 points. Election day: -35.5 to +2.2. The election-day interval is 2.4 points wider, which is the 33 days of movement still to come.

What is the uncertainty made of?

Total sd 11.53 points, made of latent opinion 65%, race-specific polling error 19%, drift to election day 12%, correlated polling error 4%. The decomposition is stored with the forecast rather than reconstructed, so a probability whose dominant input is a placeholder is visibly that.

What evidence is this built on?

3 polls, most recent 2026-09-21. every input is provisional.

What changed since the last run?

Shaded band is the 90% interval, line is the central estimate, positive is Amanda Janoo ahead of Brian Judd. Over 13 stored forecasts the central estimate moved -9.5 points. There were 6 specification changes (marked on the axis) and no new polls arrived over this window — so every movement in this chart is a change to the model, not a change in the race.

Since 2026-10-01: margin +0.00 points, win probability +0.0 points, on +0 polls.

Not answered here: why it changed. Splitting a move into new polls, time and specification means re-running the earlier model against the later inputs -- two extra posterior fits -- so it is computed on a cadence (scripts/attribute_forecasts.py) rather than while you wait. This pair of runs has not been decomposed yet. The size of the move is shown; the cause is not guessed at.

How has this model done before?

Measured on 230 forecasts across 230 races in cycles 2016,2018,2020,2022,2024: mean absolute error 4.56 points, Brier score 0.0543. The nominal 90% interval contained the result 94% of the time, the 80% interval 84%, and the 50% interval 47%. Read that with care: a national polling miss moves every race in a cycle at once, so the sample size for a question about the intervals is 5 cycle(s), not 230 forecasts. Per cycle -- bias +1.644 pts; 2016: n=43 bias=+4.68 cov90=0.860; 2018: n=63 bias=-0.52 cov90=1.000; 2020: n=35 bias=+5.44 cov90=0.886; 2022: n=54 bias=-0.60 cov90=0.944; 2024: n=35 bias=+1.48 cov90=1.000.

Where did every number come from?

Nowcast run cfe63baf-ecfd-46b2-8d47-36f27232d011 and election-day run a0a70fce-1f18-4bfb-b49f-66f24547be98, model single_race_latent/0.8.1 at commit bdf7e83107c17a2399efe61a44ef1bbee48f9284, seeds 20260924 and 20260924.