PUBLIC POLICY
Keynoter Conversation: Insights on Thriving In Polarized Times
Jim VandeHei Co-founder & CEO, Axios
Co-founder & former CEO, POLITICO
Media entrepreneur and expert Jim Van- deHei got to know his way around the worlds of media, business, and American poli- tics—and then made those worlds collide. Named to Vanity Fair magazine’s “100 Most Powerful Information Age Thinkers” list for creating “the model for the new media
success story,” he is co-founder and CEO of Axios, the influential media company founded in 2016 with “one agenda: help people get smarter, faster.” In 2006, he co-founded POLITICO,
expanding the intensely politically focused (and intensely followed) digital media com- pany from Washington, D.C. to New York and Europe. In advance of his keynote at the Ar-
gentum Public Policy Institute & Fly-In, VandeHei shares his insider knowledge and wide-ranging insights on Capitol Hill, thriving through disruption, and getting your message across clearly in today’s cha- otic media environment.
Argentum members will be visiting legisla- tors in March, but it seems diffi cult to get through or get anything done. What do you think is behind this environment? There are a couple of problems that make governing almost impossible these days. It really does start with the polarization. And the polarization is not just ideological, it’s also empirical. The biggest change I’ve seen in my 25 years here is that in raw numbers, you
just have fewer people in both parties that would even closely resemble a centrist or a moderate, or someone who would want a compromise. You really do get two parties that live in parallel universes. The overlap in viewpoints is harder to fi nd than it was before. But really, the only time complicated
things get done is when you have all-party rule. That’s when you see the burst of leg- islative activity—but it tends to be a very partisan burst.
What about voters? Are older voters still the strong force? Older voters matter as much if not more now than ever. You look at the demograph- ics of the Republican party, especially peo- ple who elect a Republican Congress, and it’s predominantly an older population. If you look at demographics and birth rate patterns, we’re an aging society; we’re not getting younger. If anything, that group of voters matters more today. It matters pro- foundly in terms of electing Donald Trump; he does well especially with white voters who tend to be older. I don’t see that that will change. Even
when you had President Obama, even with all the hoopla about him exciting younger voters, it really didn’t translate into an up- tick in terms of younger Americans getting involved in politics. If that didn’t inspire more participation in voters under 30, I’m not sure what or who would.
You recently wrote about the Business Roundtable and the pressure on companies to do more than just make a profi t. Senior living is known as a values-based industry— might that put us ahead of that curve? That’s one of the more positive shifts in
44 SENIOR LIVING EXECUTIVE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019
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the past couple of years. You basically see among younger consumers, certainly younger workers, and undoubtedly people active in social media, putting pressure on companies to really speak about things that they stand up for, either ideas, or what they do for their community, or what they do for certain segments of society. One of the big things we’re seeing, in
terms of recruitment and retention of tal- ent, is that workers under 30 care a lot more about what you stand for as a company or an organization. I think that applies to almost any compa-
ny, any sector. Particularly if you end up in a sector of technology, because there’s just a fi nite number of [applicants] out there.
You’re in media, an industry under great dis- ruption, and you created business models that thrived. Senior living is going through disruption, too—do you have any lessons learned? One of the big lessons is that I don’t think anyone is immune to disruption—not any individual job, any individual sector, any individual company. Because of changing technology, because
of changing demographics, we’re just in this cycle now where everything’s going to change, way faster than we’re used to things changing. Disruption is kind of core to that. The way you prepare for it is by having the mentality that things are going to be in constant fl ux, that you’re going to see a lot of volatility. You’ll see a lot of volatility in the economy, a lot of volatility in culture. I kind of think that’s the status quo now. It requires a diff erent kind of culture. One of the things we learned to do is to
be much more fi xated on a quarterly bud- get. We still do an annual budget, but you
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