Mother Jones - May 01, 2018

CLOAK AND DATA

TILLIS: US SENATE; COTTON: US SENATE; ROBINSON: US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES; BOLTON: GAGE SKIDMOREWIKIMEDIA; CRUZ: US SENATE; TRUMP: WHITE HOUSE

empowering a new class of individual megadonors. He

traveled here in 2010 to get the lay of the land but came

away discouraged. Political consultants picked sides in

America, he learned. A British outfit that worked with

both left- and right-of-center clients might struggle to

break into the market.

Then, on Election Day in November 2012, Republi-

can presidential candidate Mitt Romney watched as his

campaign’s voter-turnout app, code-named Project orca,

crashed. It was humiliating but indicative of a larger dy-

namic: Democrats, powered by President Barack Obama’s

2008 and 2012 runs, had gained a huge advantage over

their Republican counterparts in the realms of data and

technology. The gop’s 2012 postmortem report called for

a cultural shift inside the party to embrace new tools and

methodologies to win. “We have to be the Party that is

open and ready to rebuild our entire playbook,” it read,

“and we must take advice from outside our comfort zone.”

Nix saw his opening. scl had recently rebranded itself

as an expert in data analytics, the sifting and distilling of

vast amounts of information from different sources into

actionable outcomes. That skill set, combined with scl’s

previous work in microtargeting and psy-ops, made it an

ideal candidate to find an audience in the world of Re-

publican politics. “The Republicans had been left behind,”

Nix later said. “By the time Romney lost in 2012, there was

a vacuum. And so that was the commercial opportunity.”

Nix was soon introduced to Chris Wylie, then a twenty-

something Canadian technologist. Wylie had worked

under Obama’s director of targeting and consulted for

Canada’s Liberal Party. Nix hired him and put him to

work building a company that could attract clients in the

hypercompetitive US political market. Wylie,

for his part, had an idea about how his new

employer, scl, might gain an edge.

in 2007 , david stillwell, then a Ph.D. student

in psychology, stumbled onto a digital gold

mine. He’d always wondered about his person-

ality and how he would score in the five-factor

model, a test that measures openness, consci-

entiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and

neuroticism. Known as ocean, this model is

widely used by psychologists. But one challenge

they encountered when applying it to different

areas—marketing, relationships, politics—was

gathering suicient data. People naturally hes-

itate to give personal information about their

fears, desires, and motivations.

Stillwell knew a little code, so he pulled cer-

tain Big Five questionnaires off the internet,

stuck them in a quiz format, and uploaded

an app to Facebook called myPersonality. It

quickly went viral. Millions of people took the

quiz, and with their permission, Stillwell went

on to accumulate data on personality traits and

Facebook habits for 4 million of them.

Using this data, Stillwell, now working at

the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics

Centre, and two other researchers published

a paper in 2013 in which they showed how

you could predict an individual’s skin color or

sexuality based on her Facebook “likes.” They

found a correlation between high intelligence

and likes of “thunderstorms,” “The Colbert

Report,” and “curly fries,” while users who

liked the Hello Kitty brand tended to be high

on openness and lower on conscientiousness,

agreeableness, and emotional stability.

Stillwell told me that as an afterthought, he

and his co-authors threw in some language at

the end about the commercial possibilities of

their findings. The paper attracted the atten-

Candidate Candidacy/pac Mercer backing Paid Cambridge

Thom Tillis

2014 Republican

US Senate

candidate in

North Carolina

$5,200 $130,000

Tom Cotton

2014 Republican

US Senate

candidate in

Arkansas

$5,200 $20,000

Art Robinson

2014 Republican

US House

candidate in

Oregon

$7,800 $20,000

John Bolton

Super-pac

Super-pac that

supported Tillis

and Cotton

$5 million $1.2 million

Ted Cruz

2016 presidential

campaign

$13.5 million $133,000 (Cruz super-pac Jobs,

Freedom, and Security)

$217,000 (Mercer-funded

Cruz super-pac Make America

Number 1)

$5.8 million (Cruz for President)

Donald Trump

2016 presidential

campaign

$2.5 million $1.3 million super-pac Make

America Number 1)

$5.9 million (Trump for

President)

QUID PRO MERCER

How the megadonors have leveraged their political spending

into profits for their data firm —Olivia Exstrum