Vox hires Washington Post econ reporter Guo

Jim Tankersley, the policy and politics editor at Vox, sent out the following staff announcement on Monday:

All:

Politics & Policy is thrilled to announce another superstar addition our team: Jeff Guo is joining us from the Washington Post, to cover the intersection of politics, policy, and the media.

Jeff is an extraordinary and rare talent. He majored in economics and math at MIT, and also edited its student newspaper. He’s equally comfortable with a quick scatter plot of a long narrative about the caretaker of a National Park that is slowly succumbing to climate change. Over the course of the 2016 election, he was the first to link Donald Trump’s support in the Republic primaries to the areas where middle-aged white people were dying the most; he built a cutting-edge statistical model to compare the economic records, apples-to-apples, of the governors running for president; and he wrote the definitive analysis of why the “it’s all racism” theory of Trump’s support was wrong. He watches television in fast-forward, because it’s “more efficient.”

Jeff is a former New Republic fellow who joined the Post’s Storyline project three years ago and went on to excel at Wonkblog. (If it’s possible, I’m even more excited to hire him now than I was then.) We’ll be giving him wide berth to write about how American’s consume information, and how their consumption habits affect our political and policy debates. It’s a beat we expect will draw on all his strengths — and free him to write the truly one-of-a-kind stories he does so well. He starts on April 17.