David Axelrod: ‘I attended The University of Chicago, I was educated at the Chicago Tribune’

Donald Trump, tweet your heart out: When it comes to political messaging, nothing has displaced the almighty television set as the best medium to sway voters.

Not yet, anyway.

That’s the word from someone who should know: David Axelrod, the political messaging master who helped propel a young Illinois senator named Barack Obama to a historic presidential victory in 2008. After his candidate won the election, Axelrod moved to the White House to become the president’s senior advisor before leaving his post to maestro a second-term win.

But that’s all a second act for Axelrod. You wouldn’t know it from his appraisal of television, but the presidential confidante has his roots in newspapers. Before he left to advise political candidates, Axelrod was a standout reporter at the Chicago Tribune, becoming the paper’s city hall bureau chief at age 27. These days, he splits his time between directing The University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, which he founded, and his duties as CNN’s senior political commentator.

Poynter caught up with Axelrod Friday, before he participated in a forum on politics and media, to hear how his first career as a journalist informed his years as a political advisor and educator.

What’s the most important messaging tool available to campaigns right now?

We’re so balkanized in our choices that television isn’t as dominant as it once was. But it’s still a really important medium because it allows you to come into people’s homes with image and sound, work on their emotions, appeal to them directly. So I think it’s still important.

That said, social media becomes more important with each election. And I think you’re going to see the merger of the two, maybe as early as 2016, when people start getting media on their cellphones that’s customized to their interests and concerns.

There’s certainly been an evolution. Even in 2008, when we were running, Twitter was in its infancy — it really wasn’t a factor in that campaign. Facebook was, but not nearly the way it was in 2012 when it was an integral part of our campaign strategy. We really focused on building our Facebook followers and using those folks to talk to their friends. And we had a good sense of friends we needed them to talk to because they were much more credible exponents of our message than advertisements or other third-parties.

Do you see social media supplanting television as the dominant messaging medium?

Not in the near term. But I think what you’re going to see more and more — and you’re going to see it through commercial advertisers, as well — is customized, addressable kinds of appeals to people.

The other companion development has been the evolution of big data and the amount of information we have about voters. In our campaign, for example, we were able to analyze data from 36 million voters in the battleground states, have a clear sense of who was likely to vote against us, who was likely to vote for us, who the swing voters were, and knew a lot about what their preferences were and what their likely interests were.

We developed a program that changed how we bought media using data, so we could get a profile to the advertiser on cable and say, ‘This is our target in this market. We want to advertise to everyone who fits this profile.’ And we had a much more efficient TV buy than Mitt Romney. We were on 64 cable networks to his nine — and we saved about 15 percent off our budget for the year by buying that way. We were much more efficient in hitting our targets. Because it turns out the last voters that we have to persuade are not people who are watching the nightly news.

Like so many journalists around the world, you have your own podcast now, “The Axe Files.” How have you taken to podcasting?

I love it. I have no idea after I have these conversations what happens and how people are receiving them. But it’s really fun to have a long period of time just to chat with interesting people about their lives. Most of the time I’m talking to folks who are practitioners in politics and journalism, people who if I don’t know we have things in common.

I try to approach it that way and give people a richer sense of who these folks are and what their experiences have been. And for me, it has been a blast.

How was it making the transition from a journalist at the Chicago Tribune — a newsroom with a tradition of hard-nosed, adversarial reporting — to the position of a political adviser who had to deal with reporters who challenged your messages?

Some of my best relationships are with reporters and journalists. I really admire good journalism. The only time I get aggravated is when I feel people aren’t doing rigorous journalism and repeating conventional wisdom without digging deeper and asking questions that need to be asked.

But one of my jobs, as someone who grew up in journalism, is to explain to people in politics what the role of a journalist is. They’re not there to be stenographers and unquestioningly scribble down our messages and impart them to the public. They’re there to ask hard questions.

I think the role of journalists is to challenge authority. One of the reasons I got out of journalism was I felt in order to advance at the newspaper, I would have to become more of a corporate citizen — and that wasn’t who I was. I was no more eager to unquestioningly follow the directives of corporate executives that I was to accept what government officials were telling me without raising questions.

I think it’s an important quality, and I honor it. What I don’t honor is facile, conventional thinking. There’s a lot of pack mentality in political reporting today. I admire those people who ask the right questions, who go deep, who start with assumptions but are willing to have those assumptions disproven.

There’s more political reporting now than there ever was. But is the quality of political reporting better than ever?

It’s uneven. There’s some brilliant political reporting that’s being done today. But because of the time pressure, because everything’s instantaneous and there’s no news cycle, there is pressure to post your pieces, to get online first. When I started out, there were news cycles. Yes, you wanted to beat the other paper, but you had some time before the next deadline to do it. Editors had time to ask questions, and there wasn’t the multiplicity of competitors that you have today. I think it has become a much tougher field, because more reporters don’t have the time to do the work that they’d like to do, and many of them don’t have the editors to ask questions they should be asking.

You’re the founder and director of The University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. How do you balance your own personal views with the institute’s mission to provide nonpartisan instruction?

My mission is not to prescribe a point of view about politics. We have kids who are Republicans and kids who are Democrats and kids who are independent and skeptical of the whole thing. My mission is to persuade them that it’s important to be in the arena. That politics at its best is really something noble — which is a hard case to make sometimes given the spectacle that we see.

But it is the way we grab the wheel of history and turn it. And we need bright young people to get into that arena. Not always as candidates, but as advisers, as policy people, as reporters, to make sure that we’re headed in a good direction. I find myself in the unusual position of mentoring young Republicans. But I honor anybody who’s willing to get into the arena. We battle hard, we have different ideas, but I think we’ve got to get away from the notion in this country that if someone has a different point of view than you than they’re ipso facto not as American as you are.

If you had to do it all over again as a young man, would you still start at the Chicago Tribune? Or would you enroll at the Institute of Politics?

I started the Institute of Politics because there wasn’t anything like that when I was a kid. I was a student at The University of Chicago, and I came there because Chicago was an interesting political town, but I couldn’t find very many people that wanted to talk about anything that happened after the year 1800. I wanted to create a place where there were pathways of engagement for young people. This is a very public spirited generation, more so than any I’ve seen since I was a kid. But there’s a lot of skepticism about whether politics is a valid way to make a difference. And my job is to make sure that they can do that.

But let me say this: I would not have traded my years as a young reporter at the Chicago Tribune for anything. I always say: I attended The University of Chicago, I was educated at the Chicago Tribune. I learned so much about — not just the city, but about life, and about people. I was exposed to things I never would have been exposed to. I had a great, great experience. I look back fondly at my years as a journalist, and I think it’s a wonderful background for almost anything you want to do.

Note: Some questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.