David Axelrod Bio
David M. Axelrod (born 22 February 1955) is an American political consultant, analyst, and commentator who has been a central figure in the Democratic Party for more than four decades. He is best known for serving as the chief strategist to Barack Obama during the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and as Senior Advisor to President Obama during the administration’s first term. Over the course of his career, Axelrod has also been a political reporter, a campaign manager, a media adviser, a senior political commentator on cable news, and the founding director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
Early Life and Background
David M. Axelrod was born on 22 February 1955 in New York City, New York, and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the Stuyvesant Town area. He was raised in a liberal Jewish family and had his bar mitzvah ceremony at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Manhattan. His mother, Myril Bennett (née Davidson), worked as a journalist at PM, a liberal-leaning 1940s newspaper, and later served as an advertising executive at Young & Rubicam. His father, Joseph Axelrod, was a psychologist and an avid baseball fan who had emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States at the age of eleven.
Axelrod attended Public School 40 in Manhattan before enrolling at New York’s Stuyvesant High School, from which he graduated in 1972. His parents separated when he was eight years old, and in 2021 he disclosed that his father had suffered from severe clinical depression, a condition that ultimately led to his father’s suicide in 1977, around the time of Axelrod’s college graduation. Axelrod has described his childhood as “very turbulent,” and at the age of thirteen he was already selling campaign buttons for Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Path to US Politics
After graduating from Stuyvesant High School, Axelrod attended the University of Chicago, where he majored in political science. As an undergraduate, he wrote for the Hyde Park Herald, covering local politics, and earned an internship at the Chicago Tribune. He has often spoken about entering political work out of a sense of idealism, telling the Los Angeles Times that being part of a cause that rekindled the idealism of his youth was a powerful motivator.
The Chicago Tribune hired Axelrod after his graduation, launching an eight-year career covering national, state, and local politics. He became the paper’s youngest political writer in 1981 and, at 27, was named city hall bureau chief and a political columnist. His time at the Tribune gave him deep insight into Chicago politics and a network of contacts that would shape his next move, when in 1984 he left journalism to join U.S. Senator Paul Simon’s successful Senate campaign in Illinois as communications director. Within weeks he was promoted to co-campaign manager, marking his transition from reporter to strategist.
David Axelrod Career
Early Career (1984–1999)
In 1985, David M. Axelrod formed the political consultancy firm Axelrod & Associates, beginning a long run of campaign work that established him as a leading Democratic strategist. During the 1986 Illinois gubernatorial election he worked first for Attorney General Neil Hartigan before switching to 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 simultaneously steering Simon’s bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination.
These early campaigns gave Axelrod a reputation as a specialist in urban politics and in working with Black candidates seeking broad coalitions. He went on to serve as a key strategist for mayors 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, and he became a longtime adviser to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. In 1992, Chicago Democrat Bettylu Saltzman introduced him to a young community organizer named Barack Obama, beginning a relationship that would define the next phase of his career.
Barack Obama Presidential Campaign, 2008 (2007–2008)
When Barack Obama launched his 2008 presidential bid, David M. Axelrod joined as chief strategist and media adviser. He helped craft the campaign’s signature “change” message, contrasting Obama with the more experienced but Washington-insider positioning of Hillary Clinton. The change theme proved decisive in the Iowa caucuses, where Obama drew a clear majority of voters who identified change as their top issue, and went on to help him win a majority of the caucus-format states in the primary season.
Axelrod also embraced a digital, grassroots-driven model, building on lessons from Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. He oversaw the release of an early five-minute Internet video that helped introduce Obama to a national audience, used “man on the street”-style biographical ads to create intimacy, and helped organize an online platform that supported more than 475,000 small donors in 2007, most contributing less than $100. The New York Times described Axelrod as a “campaign guru” with an appreciation for Chicago-style politics, and Politico portrayed him as soft-spoken and mild-mannered, a calming presence inside the operation.
Senior Advisor to the President (2009–2011)
On 20 November 2008, President-elect Obama named David M. Axelrod as Senior Advisor to the President. In that role, he helped craft policy and communicate the President’s message in coordination with the Obama administration, the White House speechwriting team, and the communications staff. His tenure coincided with major early-term challenges, including the 2010 foreclosure crisis, when he drew criticism for downplaying the urgency of the so-called robo-signing problem in television interviews.
Axelrod left his White House post on 28 January 2011 to return to the campaign side of politics. In 2009, DePaul University recognized his work with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, which he received at the commencement exercises of the College of Communication and the College of Computing and Digital Media.
Obama Re-Election and University of Chicago Institute of Politics (2011–Present)
David M. Axelrod served as a top strategist for Obama’s successful 2012 re-election campaign, declaring that the role would be his final job as a political operative. After the November 2012 victory, he stepped back from consulting, and in January 2013 he established a bipartisan Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, serving as its founding director. He also briefly advised Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti ahead of the 2013 Italian general election, worked as a senior strategic adviser to the British Labour Party and Ed Miliband ahead of the 2015 UK general election, and joined NBC News and MSNBC as a senior political analyst in February 2013 before moving to CNN in September 2015.
Axelrod has continued to expand his media presence, publishing his memoir Believer: My Forty Years in Politics in 2015, hosting the long-running podcast The Axe Files, and co-hosting the podcast Hacks on Tap with Republican strategist Mike Murphy beginning in 2019. In 2022, he announced his plan to retire as director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and become a senior fellow and chair of its advisory board, effective January 2023. University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos credited his leadership with driving the Institute of Politics’ growth and success over the previous decade.
Notable Events and Milestones
Among the defining moments of David M. Axelrod’s career are the Iowa caucuses of January 2008, where the “change” message he helped build propelled Obama toward the Democratic nomination, and the 2008 and 2012 general election victories that made Axelrod one of the most recognized strategists in modern Democratic politics. His founding of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics in 2013 and his continued role as a CNN senior political commentator have kept him at the center of national political debate.
David Axelrod Family
Family Background and Political Lineage
David M. Axelrod comes from a family shaped by journalism, psychology, and political engagement. His mother, Myril Bennett (née Davidson), was a journalist at the 1940s liberal newspaper PM and later an advertising executive, while his father, Joseph Axelrod, was a psychologist whose own struggle with severe clinical depression profoundly influenced his son’s outlook. The family’s commitment to public affairs continued in the next generation: David M. Axelrod’s wife, Susan Landau, whom he met as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, is the daughter of physician-scientist Richard L. Landau, and together the Axelrods co-founded Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy (CURE).
Personal Life
David M. Axelrod married Susan Landau in 1979. The couple’s first child, a daughter named Lauren, was born in June 1981 and was diagnosed with epilepsy at seven months of age. Lauren is developmentally disabled, and after years of searching for appropriate programs, the family placed her in Misericordia, a large dormitory-style group home in Chicago, in 2002. The Axelrods have two other children in addition to Lauren, and as of 2021 Axelrod continued to advocate publicly for a flexible, mixed approach to group homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.