Swinging The Axe – Why hiring Axelrod means Miliband is going big

David Axelrod has been hired by Labour to work on the party’s general election campaign. First – let me get the excitement out. David Axelrod is the biggest star in the world when it comes to political campaigning. Nevermind “guru”, this guy is a campaigning deity in his own right. From Barack Obama’s Chicago kitchen table to the Oval Office was a journey that few thought possible, but Axelrod managed the shift from state senator, to Senator, to President in a decade. I must admit that last year when the Tories hired Jim Messina I was really disappointed. In an otherwise downbeat post I wrote that “Labour could do much worse than approaching David Axelrod…to run a professional, experienced campaign for Downing Street”. But if I’m honest, I never thought I’d see the day when Labour could attract Axelrod, or afford him for that matter.

Now – let me get the realism out. Strategists don’t win campaigns on their own. Far from it. A winning campaign needs a combination of a strong candidate (or in a parliamentary system, candidates), strong ideas that resonate with the public, an ability to chime with the national mood and an active and engaged army of supporters. Axelrod is only one part of a much bigger machine – as he himself admitted in the video he recorded for Labour supporters, “It’s isn’t people like me who win these elections – it’s people like you”. Axelrod should know the difference between great campaigns and duds, because he’s worked on both kinds. For the stellar, see Obama 2008 and 2012. For the opposite end of the spectrum, see John Edwards in 2004, and last year’s poor Mario Monti campaign in Italy.

So realism and excitement aside – what does hiring David Axelrod mean for Labour in the next 12 months?

It means the party is going big in two key ways.

Going big on votes – the end to coalition talk: You don’t spend hundreds of thousands on hiring one of the world’s most famous political strategists unless you’re aiming to win the election outright. That means that talk of a hung parliament, possible coalition with the Lib Dems or being the largest party will be thrown out of the window.

Firstly – because that’s presumably what Axelrod will tell them to do, this isn’t a guy who plays for a draw.

And secondly, because if the party is able to throw significant sums at hiring strategists – with Labour’s finances being parlous – then it means you need a knockout win first time around. As Douglas Alexander (who along with Ed Miliband deserves credit for the coup that the Axelrod hire certainly is) said this morning, the party can’t afford celebrity hires as window dressing. That means no re-run elections like in 1974, because we won’t be able to afford one.

Anyone advocating a small voter pool strategy to Axelrod will likely be given short shrift – a cobbled together ex-Lib Dems plus Labour 2010 voters coalition is the antithesis of the big campaign run by Obama in 2008 and especially 2012. I’d expect a renewed focus on energising non-voters and encouraging the unregistered to vote, in line with the relentless focus of the 2012 Obama campaign on those areas. Axelrod will also want to see volunteers mobilised and used effectively – something that Messina is trying to do with the Tories to little avail (as they have so few volunteers). As he told the Guardian “a campaign like this will work best by mobilising people at grassroots and in local communities who understand that their economic future is on the ballot paper” – that should be tied in with the work that Arnie Graf has been doing on at a community and grassroots level when he returns.

Going big on policy – the big message: Perhaps even more important than the scale and scope of the campaign though is the size of the message and the offer. Axelrod has already indicated that he’ll be sticking to the cost of living messaging that Labour has been using over the past year – despite attempts by the Tories to claim that everything is fine now. Axelrod will want to see Labour talking in sweeping but accessible terms about the way society and the economy needs to change so that it works for the people of Britain not just an elite at the top. His mantra in America is that the economy needs to work for “Main Street not just Wall Street”. The British version might be “Prosperity for your city – not just the City”. (Expect to see a sharpening of the messaging the party uses – and also the messaging it expects activists to use, perhaps by brushing up the party’s much maligned weekly campaign email.)

But at his core, Axelrod is a passionate advocate of progressive causes. Despite the misgivings that many on the British Left have with the US President, he’s by far the closest America has got to a Social Democrat leader since FDR. That wasn’t achieved by going small on policy or messaging. It was built on “hope”, “change” and the biggest reform of healthcare in American history (no small feat, Presidents have hit the rocks over less). It’ll be interesting to see what Axelrod does with the results of Jon Cruddas’s policy review – we’ve been promised boldness there, and that’ll need to be true to match the scale of the vision that Axelrod will want Miliband to paint.