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Senior Labour staffer says newly appointed senior strategist will focus on mobilising activists in 2015 election

David Axelrod, Labour's newly appointed senior strategist and Barack Obama's closest long-term political adviser, will make mobilisation of Labour's grassroots central to the election campaign, a senior Labour staffer who has worked for Obama has forecast.

Axelrod himself stressed on Friday that he could not help Labour succeed at the next election without the mobilisation of local communities, adding - in his first effort to energise Labour members - that the world would be watching the outcome of the 2015 vote. The Guardian revealed on Thursday that Axelrod was joining the Labour campaign team as a senior strategist.

Matthew McGregor, who is advising Labour on digital campaigning, worked on the Obama campaign in 2012 in Chicago. He told the Guardian: "Axelrod puts mobilisation of activists at the centre of all his campaigns. It is one way he views political empowerment. Obama said whether he won or lost the election, he wanted to leave politics better off at the end of the campaign by finding more ways to involve people in politics. He harnesses data, digital techniques and doorstep canvassers to create an effective movement online and offline."

There is scepticism in Conservative circles that Axelrod can have the same impact in Britain since Miliband is a less charismatic candidate than Obama, and the room for paid political advertising - a mainstay of controlling a candidate's campaign message - is debarred in the UK.

The scale of politics is also incomparable. By the end of the 2012 campaign Obama had 4.4 million donors, 16 million email addresses, 4,000 employees, 8,000 neighbourhood teams, 32,000 trained volunteers and an analytics staff knowledgeable enough of voting intention to be capable of predicting results in counties to within a percentage point.

McGregor, responsible for social media attack ads in the Obama campaign and now a staffer at Blue State Digital, claimed Labour was better placed to adopt Obama campaign techniques than the Tories. He said: "In style and tone we have already geared up for giving our members a big role in the campaign backed by 100 field workers. He is very good at crafting a message, but grassroots involvement has been the hallmark of all Axelrod's campaigns."

McGregor said that even though Jim Messina, the Obama 2012 campaign manager, had been hired on a consultancy basis by David Cameron, he did not think the Conservatives had the people on the ground to knock on doors to create and then make use of complex data on individual voting intention. The hallmark of the Obama campaign had been its detailed knowledge of those who were persuadable to vote, and then having the people on the doorstep to make use of that information.

He said: "The Tories will have the money, but we will have the people on the ground."

Axelrod told the Guardian on Thursday: "Ultimately a campaign like this is going to work by mobilising people at the grassroots and in local communities who understand they have a stake in this and their economic future is on the ballot paper."

McGregor accepted that some of the Obama data analytics techniques did not translate from America to Britain. "They had information on where to spend the most cost-effective adverts on cable TV so by the end even though they spent less on advertising than the Romney campaign, they had reached more people."

But Labour plans to use social media such as Twitter and Facebook as much as it can to attract younger voters. It already has more email contacts of general party sympathisers than it has of full-time party members, and they will be used as a resource for campaigning and funds. Membership is believed to be just below 200,000.

The Tory party is substantially smaller, more elderly and suffering from defections to Ukip.

Labour is not seeking to make any comparisons between Miliband as a campaigner and Obama, but believes the two men do have a shared view that the break in the link between growth and living standards is the central challenge facing modern economies.

Although Labour acknowledges that voters have little trust in any of the three party leaders, it believes this will be one of the longest campaigns in history due to the fixed-term parliament. It expects the campaign effectively to last four months from early January, and this will give Miliband a chance with voters who have largely let politics pass by their daily lives.

But Douglas Alexander, the election co-ordinator, acknowledged that the election would be a tight contest.