BRITISH ELECTION RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF POLITICAL STRATERGIST/ADVISER: THE HUMILIATION OF DAVID AXELROD, OBAMA’S ELECTION GURU

Ed Miliband on the left and Axelrod

High-stakes match-up between two former Obama advisers ended in defeat for David Axelrod as the UK’s Labour party was bested by the Tories. Adviser to the winning Conservative party, Jim Messina, was the brains behind U.S. President Barack Obama’s successful 2012 re-election. Axelrod was chief adviser to Obama on his 2008 and 2012 campaigns. 

What does this tell us about the arts and the science of political campaigns?  It tells us that the two are often in competition.  The arts attempt to paint a glorious picture, which is enticing enough to get a lot of people to the polls for a candidate.  The science depends on probabilities, assumptions and hypotheses.  

It is always possible to get a lot of people to the polls and yet come up short on the science side, if some of the assumptions, upon which the predicted probabilities are based, are wrong.  Thus, David Axelrod is in a very good position to manage the arts and the science, even though he came up short this time.  

Of course, the great political science mind in Prof. Axelrod is worth every dollar his company gets, but I do not believe that he had very much, to do with the result of the presidential election in Nigeria.  

The interesting thing is that many Nigerians, in their usual love of conspiracy theories had put the black hat on the professor long before the election, and paraded his name around as one of the Americans, including President Obama, who were attempting to install an Islamist in the Nigerian presidency.  It was a ludicrous and yet interesting tale. It was as if David Axelrod's company was an extension of the White House, where the president had lost his mind. 

David Axelrod had been touted as the man to get Labour’s, Ed Miliband into and the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron out of Downing Street. Instead he sneaked out of Britain early, as his former Obama campaign colleague Jim Messina, who advised the winning Conservatives, crowed over a victory which had ‘stunned the world’.

Axelrod had already vowed that he was 'done with campaigns' after complaining bitterly about the British media and saying: 'Anyone who underestimates Ed Miliband does so at their own peril.'

And the famed pollster Nathan Silver was also humiliated by the British election, with his forecast for the result, like every other opinion poll, completely wrong.

Congrats David Cameron!