Back in late 2021, in the heady times following Politico’s $1 billion sale to Axel Springer, the once feisty and plucky, now establishment-ish media company’s leadership team started searching for a new executive editor to oversee its core coverage of American politics—the quadrumvirate of campaigns, Capitol Hill, the courts and the White House. After all, this had been Politico’s DNA in the earliest John Harris–Jim VandeHei–Mike Allen years, before the business mushroomed into a flourishing transatlantic media powerhouse with a highly lucrative policy-focused subscription service, myriad live events, a magazine, local politics coverage, an ill-fated tech news sister brand, and ambitions to establish itself as a leading player from Sacramento to Brussels.