Rising Stars 2011 - Campaigns and Elections Magazine

Campaigns and Elections

Each year, Campaigns & Elections Magazine selects a new class of Rising Stars—an exclusive group of operatives age thirty-five and under who have an established track record of achievement and the promise to achieve greatness.

First recognized in 1988, Rising Stars have gone on to do great things. Mayors, members of Congress, and presidential advisors can all be found among previous classes of Rising Stars. Past honorees include David Axelrod, James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, Donna Brazile, Alex Castellanos, Ben Ginsberg, Ed Goeas, Mike Murphy, Bill McInturff, and George Stephanopoulos.

From many worthy nominations, we have selected fifteen Republicans, fifteen Democrats, and ten nonpartisan or international operatives as this year’s Rising Stars. Among them are general consultants as well as specialists in both established and emerging disciplines.


Aron Shaviv, 32, International
CEO, Shaviv Strategy and Campaigns Ltd.



Aron Shaviv, who is based in Israel, specializes in helping run research-driven campaigns for center-right candidates in Central and Eastern Europe. The democratic tradition in these countries may be a bit less developed than in the United States or Western Europe, and campaigning less advanced, but this offers all the more opportunity to have an impact.

“Once in a blue moon,” Shaviv says, “you actually get to touch history and shift it a fraction of an inch to the right or to the left.”

A campaign Shaviv worked on as a junior consultant fell into this category: the narrow 2008 victory of Serbian President Boris Tadic over a far-right opponent. Highlights since he launched his own consulting firm include rebranding the seven twenty-something leaders of the Moldovan Christian Democratic People’s Party as “The Magnificent Seven” in the run-up to parliamentary elections in 2009 and guiding to victory a Slovakian candidate for municipal office who, seven weeks before the election, had been polling at just 2.6 percent—over 40 points behind the incumbent. Shaviv finds that many of the candidates he works for have made attempts at polling, but haven’t gotten past measuring a snapshot of how the race stands at a given point.

“Most of the work I do is changing the patterns of public opinion research to be much more strategic in the sense of testing future messages, testing policy initiatives,” he says. The one place Shaviv won’t work is his home country. “As consultants, what we should be offering is complete objectivity,” he says, “which I find I can’t offer in Israel because in Israel every decision a politician makes affects myself, affects my family.”