Did data-mining firm sell genius or fool’s gold?
Many in GOP view Cambridge Analytica as nothing more than access to donations
WASHINGTON — When Cambridge Analytica officials met GOP strategist Mike Murphy at the start of the 2016 presidential campaign, their pitch was slick and full of swagger — but after a little probing, Murphy found it to be full of nonsense.
At the time, a meeting with Murphy was in demand. He was heading Right to Rise, a political action committee that was practically printing money, ultimately raising $118 million in its unsuccessful effort to elect Jeb Bush. Murphy’s team concluded that Cambridge Analytica had nothing to offer other than hype.
Disclosures this week that the firm used massive amounts of data from Facebook to develop profiles of U.S. voters to help Donald Trump’s campaign have generated a public image of Cambridge Analytica as devious masterminds of electoral manipulation. A secretly videotaped interview in which the firm’s CEO lays out how it could help clients blackmail rivals only fueled that perception.
But some Republican campaign professionals, data scholars and former clients offer a different take.
“They were telling me what they had to sell was more advanced than anything I had ever seen before,” Murphy said of the firm’s promise to use “psychographic profiling” that would cycle the tastes and interests of millions of voters into algorithms that then target them with tailor-made, highly persuasive digital ads. “They were just throwing jargon around,” he added, recalling the firm also claimed it did topsecret work for the military.
The company now is at the center of a growing firestorm that includes Facebook, the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. and U.K. governments.
Cambridge’s board of directors suspended CEO Alexander Nix pending an investigation after Nix boasted of various unsavory services to an undercover reporter for Britain’s Channel 4 News.
Channel 4 News broadcast clips Tuesday that also show Nix saying his datamining firm played a major role in securing Trump’s victory.
Nix said the firm handled “all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting” and said Cambridge used emails Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix has been suspended by the firm’s board of directors after being recorded making admissions to a Channel 4 reporter. with a “self-destruct timer” to make its role more difficult to trace.
“There’s no evidence, there’s no paper trail, there’s nothing,” he said.
Cambridge has denied wrongdoing, and Trump’s campaign has said it didn’t use Cambridge’s data.
Leading Democrats in the U.S. Senate also called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called Facebook’s latest privacy scandal a “danger signal.”
Regarding Cambridge Analytica, the company for some clients had been more a conduit to endearing themselves to its billionaire financial backer, Robert Mercer, a major contributor to conservative campaigns.
“The thinking was if it gets Mercer to fund your super PAC, then it’s worth it to use this firm,” said Luke Thompson, vice president for politics and advocacy at the Republican analytics firm Applecart. But he said Cambridge Analytica’s claim that it has reinvented political persuasion is based on “ludicrous assumptions.”
Thompson was helping lead data efforts for the National Republican Senate Committee when the firm pitched its products in 2014. Thompson, a former academic who has taught at Yale, found the claims it was making absurd. He said that the psychographic mapping they were promising could be done on a large scale struck him as improbable, and of limited value even if they did pull it off.
“It was all based on this pop psychology b.s., and even if you could do it, it would add only the most marginal value to a campaign,” he said. “Nobody was asking them the most basic data sourcing questions … If you want to know what people think about politics, why would you do these surveys where you ask them about things like antique cars? Why not just ask them about politics?”
Such criticism of the firm, common among GOP analytics leaders, was muted by its connection to Mercer, a hedge fund bil- lionaire who created a formula of algorithms and equations for investing that only a select group of math geniuses understand.
“I don’t understand how a man as smart as him put all this money into this black hole of nonsense,” Thompson said. The firm’s profile also got a boost from its connection to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who was a vice president there until joining the campaign.
Cambridge Analytica did not respond to questions about Mercer’s involvement or the firm’s track record.