When he launched Strategic Communication Laboratories (SLC) in 1993, Nigel Oakes embraced the image of the worldly mercenary, albeit with an English accent. If the Americans abroad justified their emotional appeals as the result of instincts honed in the world’s most intense political environment, Oakes, a former Monte Carlo TV producer marketed the rigor of Britain’s ancient universities. Oakes, who had also worked for the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, argued that traditional advertising was incapable of effecting the type of mass opinion shifts necessary for social change. He marshaled scholarly research, much of it from psychologists and anthropologists filtered through the Behavioral Dynamics Institute, an affiliated non-profit that Oakes had established as a research facility for understanding group behavior.
In 2010, SLC traveled to the United States to learn more about the country’s political sector but left discouraged by the insularity of the consulting industry.
After the 2012 election, SLC found an American marketplace far more receptive. Their overseas work in conflict zones amounted to a promising calling card, a new comparative advantage over entrenched American political firms. They found that trying to use psychology to understand why hostile audiences do what they do, and to use this methodology to deconstruct that behavior and then use communication to try and change attitudes and ultimately behavior might work. Persuading somebody to vote in a certain way is really very similar to persuading 14- to 25-year-old boys in Indonesia to not join Al Qaeda.
Among those apparently motivated by this pitch was the family of Robert Mercer, whom Forbes has repeatedly ranked among the country’s highest-earning hedge-fund managers. Mercer made his fortune as Co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a Long Island fund unusually proud of its appreciation for academic credentials over investing experience. Mercer worked at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Center before entering finance, trying to teach computers to recognize human language.
Mercer is the type of wealthy citizen most emboldened by the Citizens United decision, unlikely to engage in the greasy work of bundling others’ contributions but happy to directly sponsor his preferred causes. Along with his wife, Diana, Mercer gave just shy of $10 million to Republican campaigns and committees in 2014, making him the country’s fourth-largest individual donor, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Mercer emerged as a major financial force in conservative politics just as it became an ideal sphere in which to indulge his pursuit for interesting technical programs. In 2013, SCL Elections spun off its American operations into a district entity, Cambridge Analytica (CA). They wanted to look and feel like an American company. Just as significantly, it then became a Republican company. The Mercers have repackaged CA as an ingenious cog in the GOP party machinery that can crank out votes using their new methods. Earlier this fall, the firm moved its Washington office to Alexandria’s Old Town, the seat of the Republican consulting sector.
“Your behavior is driven by your personality and actually the more you can understand about people’s personality as psychological drivers, the more you can actually start to really tap in to why and how they make their decisions,” says CA. “We call this behavioral micro targeting and this is really our secret sauce, if you like. This is what we’re bringing to America.”
CA's trophy product is “psychographic profiles” of every potential voter in the U.S. interwoven with more conventional political data. The emphasis on psychology helps to differentiate the Brits from other companies that specialized in “microtargeting,” a catch-all term typically used to describe any analysis that uses statistical modeling to predict voter intent at the individual level. Such models predicting an individual’s attitudes or behavior are typically situational—many voters’ likelihood of casting a ballot dropped off significantly from 2012 to 2014, and their odds of supporting a Republican might change if the choice shifted from Mitt Romney to Scott Brown. CA offered to layer atop those predictions of political behavior an assessment of innate attributes like extroversion that were unlikely to change with the electoral calendar.
Conventional microtargeting, CA argues, “of course has to be flawed because you’re making this presumption that all women think the same simply because they are women, or all African Americans likewise because of their skin color or whichever demographic you want to choose, which is archaic, really.”
For a generation, pollsters have been attempting to move past simple demography by accounting for the psychological baggage that voters tote with them from one election to the next. As early as 1984, Ronald Reagan strategist Richard B. Wirthlin included batteries of abstract questions in his surveys, looking to identify relationships between what he called voters’ “values” and the messages that could shift their political preferences. For Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection, Mark Penn conducted what he branded a “NeuroPersonality Poll.”
What has changed is the range of data available about those voters whom a pollster didn’t reach, which in the 1980s and 1990s included little beyond what was on the public electoral rolls. Campaigns already used algorithms to infer political and demographic attributes about voters they couldn’t contact directly; why couldn’t those same statistical models predict innate psychological characteristics, as well? While Wirthlin and Penn could isolate archetypes—Penn christened “soccer moms” as part of such an exercise, they lacked the data about the electorate to identify the individuals who comprised each of the clusters so they could be contacted directly. By 2012, such data, and the statistical tools necessary to sift through 200 million potential American voters along its terms, were widespread.
SCL began hiring Ph.Ds, many of them from the University of Cambridge, from fields where manipulating large data sets is routine. As a result, it is probably the only political consulting firm whose employee bios delineate sub-disciplines within the hard sciences, separating those who studied astrophysics from theoretical physics, condensed matter physics, theoretical solid state physics. Very few of them have ever before stepped near a campaign office, and they demonstrate little familiarity with political life in the United States. In casual conversations about the subject, CA employees speak of “the Tea Party” and “Conservative Christians” as distant oddities, in a manner typical of educated Europeans.
College ties may have shaped the company’s intellectual heritage, but CA’s prospects are now determined by its links to American hedge-fund wealth. It is Robert Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, otherwise responsible for the Mercer Family Foundation, who said to be the biggest booster of CA’s methods. By all accounts, the company’s business has become deeply intertwined with the family’s political interests. In Manhattan, the company shares an address with the free-market advocacy group Reclaim New York, where Rebekah Mercer serves as treasurer. “To break into the U.S. political market you need more than just a good idea, you actually need to have people to believe in you,”.
All of CA’s clients in 2014 were also recipients of contributions from the financier. In 2013, the company’s only American client was the Middle Resolution PAC, a Virginia conservative group then working to elect Ken Cuccinelli as the state’s Governor, an unpaid pilot project to show how CA might work.
“The traditional microtargeting vendors I’ve worked with, they were all waiting for me to call them, I guess,” says Paul Shumaker, a North Carolina general consultant who hired CA to work for Thom Tillis’s successful campaign for the Senate last year. “We were one of the top US Senate races in the country and I never got approached by anybody else, which told me they were either too busy or took me for granted.”
CA might not have had to work so hard for one of its more lucrative 2014 accounts. With a $1 million contribution, Robert Mercer was the largest single donor to the John Bolton super-PAC. The group had one objective, to convince voters to support Republican candidates based on national-security issues, and it served well to demonstrate a personality-driven theory of political persuasion. Bolton’s committee agreed to communicate over satellite-television systems like Dish and DirecTV, which, unlike broadcast and most cable systems, permitted ads to be assigned differently to specific subscribers, allowing CA to fully exploit the benefit of its individual-level modeling.
The firm, which was paid $341,025 for its work, advised Bolton’s team on the design of six ads, thirty seconds each, with wildly different creative approaches. One ad, targeted at voters modeled to be conscientious and agreeable, was set to upbeat music and showed Bolton standing outdoors on a bright day, matter-of-factly addressing the need to “leave a stronger, safer America for our children.”
In another, aimed at neurotics, the diplomat was invisible—replaced by storm clouds, foreigners burning American flags, and an admonition to “vote like your life depends on it,” intoned by an disembodied narrator. “That’s obviously something that’s quite emotive, as we’re really looking to drive an emotional reaction from an audience who would be inclined to give you one.”
At the same time, Jobs, Growth & Freedom Fund, a leadership PAC launched by Ted Cruz in preparation for his Presidential campaign, paid CA just under $400,000, most of it to support digital advertising on behalf of other candidates. Mercer donated $1.75 million to the committee over the course of the fall of 2015. By the time the committee transitioned this spring into a full-fledged Presidential campaign, CA was fully integrated into the Texas senator’s political plans. Even before he formally announced his candidacy, opened his Houston office, or had a pollster in place, Cruz had a London-based firm on call to tell him which Iowans were introverted and which were neurotic.
Cruz for President has relied on CA as a ready-made data-science department that spares the campaign the challenge of having to hire and compensate its members individually. This is already enough of a challenge for Republican campaigns, who have trouble identifying friendly Quantitative analyst from academia or the tech sector, even without fourteen different Presidential campaigns all angling for the same talent. Finding astrophysics postdocs who will happily work for Ted Cruz may be easier in Cambridge, England, than Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rebekah Mercer is said to talk bullishly about the innovative potential of “psychographic” modeling, but her greatest gift to Republican analytics may be as an end run around a dispiritingly tight labor market: finding foreigners to do the analytics jobs that Americans just won’t do.
There is little evidence yet that Cruz’s campaign has determined if, or how, to use CA’s “psychographics” at what the company depicts as their fullest potential. Chris Wilson, a pollster who had guided Cruz’s microtargeting efforts in his 2012 campaign, was unconvinced that predicting voters’ personalities was as universal a tool for unlocking their attitudes and behavior as CA executives claimed. But if the method ever were to prove its utility, he thought it would happen in a fractured primary field, where, as opposed to a general election featuring stark choices between different parties, campaigns are constantly looking for ways to magnify ultimately minor differences among candidates into major distinctions in voters’ minds.
"In a primary composed of Republicans, there's not a big gap of difference between where each of the candidates are on a single issue, so your ability to connect with a voter on an issue is very important,” says Wilson, who now serves as the campaign’s director of research and analytics. “You're appreciating the reason they care about the issue."
Indeed, few of CA’s clients appear to be taking full advantage of what employees describes as its “bespoke” service, the tailoring of messages and targeting tactics to align with its personality profiles. “I’m not convinced it would make any difference whatsoever,” says one veteran consultant who has worked closely with the Republican party’s data infrastructure. “Even if what they are pitching is tangible and legitimate and can really give you voters to talk to in a different tone no campaign has the bandwidth. There’s not the targeting ability to do it.”
In most cases, CA appears to be functioning as the type of straightforward microtargeter that many considered insufficiently alert to the vagaries of human psychology. In North Carolina, where the company was paid $150,000 by the state party and $30,000 by Tillis’s campaign, CA developed models to predict individual support, turnout likelihoods, and issues of concern that would re-calibrate continuously based on interactions with voters. CA says that dynamic process allowed Tillis’s campaign to identify a sizable cluster of North Carolinians who prioritized foreign affairs, which encouraged Tillis to shift the conversation from state-level debates over education policy to charges that incumbent Kay Hagan had failed to take ISIS’s rise seriously.
In conference calls and pitch meetings, CA executives and analysts have betrayed confusion, if not outright ignorance, about some basics of American campaigns, from the definition of precincts, the smallest unit at which voter data is collected, to the difference between turnout patterns in primaries and caucuses.
The fact that this London-based firm was already working for a well-funded American Presidential campaign represented a dramatic inversion of the natural order. Political consulting, after all, has been among of the most durable of the United States’ exports. The world’s political class often maintains a conflicted view of American professionals: envious of the sophistication of their extravagant electoral pageants; resentful of the idea that the mere fact of their passport gives them standing to direct strategy in countries they are often visiting for the first time.
This fall, Sandra Bullock plays an operative who parachutes in to help a Bolivian Presidential candidate in Our Brand Is Crisis, based on the 2005 documentary of the same name about the Bolivian adventures of James Carville, Stan Greenberg, and Bob Shrum.
In each case, the Americans play the same role: jet-set hirelings, alternately ruthless and naive, imposing cookie-cutter strategies on campaigns worldwide. “Politics in country after country has become as similar as Starbucks, and about as surprising. The assumption underpinning the international consultancy business is that the same principles apply everywhere, that a foreign country is just like another swing state, just like Ohio,” James Harding wrote in Alpha Dogs, his book about American consultants who pioneered cross-border political consulting. “The battle is ever more for hearts, not minds: America’s winning and irresistible formula has been to repackage an intellectual argument inside an emotional appeal.”
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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