David M. Axelrod (born February 22, 1955) is an American political consultant and analyst. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the chief strategist to Barack Obama during his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. In addition, during Obama's first term, Axelrod worked in the White House as the senior advisor to the president.
Axelrod, from New York City, started his career as a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He subsequently helped lead Paul Simon's successful 1984 bid for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. Forming a political consultancy firm, Axelrod built a reputation as a sought-after Democratic strategist, especially in Illinois. His clients included Chicago Mayors Harold Washington and Richard M. Daley to whom he served as a longtime advisor. Axelrod expanded his national profile advising John Edwards during his 2004 presidential campaign and Rahm Emanuel for the 2006 midterms.
During the 2008 presidential election, Axelrod worked as the chief strategist to Barack Obama, whom he had first met in the early 1990s. After Obama's election, Axelrod was appointed as Senior Advisor to the President. He left the position in early 2011 to become the Senior Strategist for Obama's successful re-election campaign in 2012. After the campaign, Axelrod retired from consulting and served as the director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics from 2012 until 2023. He has also been a Senior Political Commentator on CNN since 2015.
David Axelrod was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York and grew up in its Stuyvesant Town area. He is from a liberal Jewish family and had his bar mitzvah at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Manhattan. His mother, Myril Bennett (née Davidson), was a journalist at PM, a liberal-leaning 1940s newspaper, and later an advertising executive at Young & Rubicam. His father, Joseph Axelrod, was a psychologist and avid baseball fan, who emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States at 11. David attended Public School 40 in Manhattan. His parents separated when he was eight years old. In 2021, Axelrod disclosed in a CNN op-ed that his father suffered from severe clinical depression, unbeknownst at the time to the family, which led to his suicide when the younger Axelrod was 19.
Describing the appeal of politics, David Axelrod told the Los Angeles Times, "I got into politics because I believe in idealism. Just to be a part of this effort that seems to be rekindling the kind of idealism that I knew when I was a kid, it's a great thing to do. So I find myself getting very emotional about it." At 13, he sold campaign buttons for Robert F. Kennedy. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan in 1972, Axelrod attended the University of Chicago, where he majored in political science. Axelrod described his childhood as "very turbulent", although he did not specify the exact details that elicited this characterization. As an undergraduate, Axelrod wrote for the Hyde Park Herald, covering politics, and earned an internship at the Chicago Tribune.
Axelrod lost his father to suicide in 1977 around the time of his college graduation. While at the University of Chicago, he met his future wife, business student Susan Landau (daughter of physician-scientist Richard L. Landau) and they married in 1979.
They have three children. In June 1981, their first child, a daughter was born.. She was diagnosed with epilepsy at seven months of age. Axelrod describes Lauren as having had brutal seizures, requiring a constantly changing regimen of medications for some time. This left her developmentally disabled, but nevertheless mainstreamed in school. For a few years after high school, the family struggled to find programs that would keep her happy and fulfilled, but were able to place her in Misericordia, a large dormitory-style group home in 2002, where she leads an active life. As of 2021, Axelrod advocates for a flexible, mixed approach to group homes that support environments for people like his daughter, in contrast to the common approach of exclusively moving toward smaller group homes.
The Chicago Tribune hired Axelrod after his graduation from college. He worked there for eight years, covering national, state and local politics, becoming their youngest political writer in 1981. At 27, he became the city hall bureau chief and a political columnist for the paper. He left the Tribune and joined the campaign of U.S. senator Paul Simon as communications director in 1984. Within weeks he was promoted to co-campaign manager.
In 1985, Axelrod formed the political consultancy firm, Axelrod & Associates. During the 1986 Illinois gubernatorial election, he was hired by the campaign of then-attorney general Neil Hartigan, but switched to work for former senator Adlai Stevenson III when he entered the Democratic primary. In 1987 he worked on the successful reelection campaign of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, while spearheading Simon's campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. This established his experience in working with black politicians; he later became a key player in similar mayoral campaigns of black candidates, including Dennis Archer in Detroit, Michael R. White in Cleveland, Anthony A. Williams in Washington, D.C., Lee P. Brown in Houston, and John F. Street in Philadelphia. Axelrod is a longtime strategist for the former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley and styles himself a "specialist in urban politics." The Economist notes he also specializes in "packaging black candidates for white voters".
In January 1990, Axelrod was hired to be the media consultant for the all but official re-election campaign of Oregon Governor Neil Goldschmidt. However, in February Goldschmidt decided not to seek re-election. Axelrod was retained by the Liberal Party of Ontario to help Dalton McGuinty and his party in 2002 to be elected into government in the October 2003 election. Axelrod's effect on Ontario was heard through the winning Liberal appeal to "working families" and placing an emphasis on positive policy contrasts like canceling corporate tax breaks to fund education and health.
In 2004, Axelrod worked for John Edwards' presidential campaign. He lost responsibility for making ads, but continued as the campaign's spokesman. Regarding Edwards' failed 2004 presidential campaign, Axelrod has commented, "I have a whole lot of respect for John, but at some point the candidate has to close the deal and—I can't tell you why—that never happened with John." Axelrod worked as a consultant for Exelon, a Chicago utility which operated the largest fleet of nuclear reactors in the United States.
Axelrod contributed an op-ed to the Chicago Tribune in defense of patronage politics after two top officials in the administration of longtime client Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley were arrested for what federal prosecutors described as "pervasive fraud" in City Hall hiring and promotions. In 2006, he consulted for several campaigns, including the successful campaigns of Eliot Spitzer in New York's gubernatorial election and Deval Patrick in Massachusetts's gubernatorial election. Also in 2006, Axelrod served as the chief political adviser for Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair U.S. Representative Rahm Emanuel for the U.S. House of Representatives elections, in which the Democrats gained 31 seats.
He was an adjunct professor of communication studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where with Professor Peter Miller, he taught an undergraduate class titled Campaign Strategy, analyzing political campaigns, and their strategies. On June 14, 2009, he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from DePaul University, speaking at the commencement exercises of the College of Communication and College of Computing and Digital Media.
Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008
Axelrod first met Obama in 1992, when Bettylu Saltzman, a Chicago Democrat, introduced the two of them after Obama had impressed her at a black voter registration drive that he ran. Obama consulted Axelrod before he delivered a 2002 anti-war speech, and asked him to read drafts of his book The Audacity of Hope.