28 MOTHER JONES |^ MAY JUNE 2018
CLOAK AND DATAgiven a seat on the board and a stake in the new company
to help, as Nix later said, the firm navigate the US politi-
cal scene. Nix installed himself in Mercerworld, present-
ing himself as Bekah Mercer’s political guru and taking
meetings at the Breitbart Embassy, the Capitol Hill row
house that served as the conservative website’s oices and
Bannon’s crash pad. The company was incorporated in
Delaware on December 31, 2013. The name was a mix of
old and new: Cambridge Analytica.
But if the Mercers had paid closer attention to a test run of
Nix’s venture in the 2013 Virginia governor’s race, they might
have reconsidered going into business with scl. A political
action committee called the Middle Resolution had paid Nix’s
company several hundred thousand dollars that year for a list
of persuadable voters to help elect Republican Ken Cuccinelli,
who was running for governor. Months passed, and the list
never arrived. When the group’s chairman, Bob Bailie, de-
manded the list, Nix asked for more money and Bailie cut
bait. Another Virginia-based group, Americans for Limited
Government, then paid scl $100,000 to create a list of sub-
urban female voters who traditionally
supported Democrats but might be
swayed to vote for Cuccinelli if shown
the right message. Late in the race, the
group’s canvassers took Nix’s list into
the field and returned with a perplex-
ing result: The people on it were already
Cuccinelli supporters. The higher-ups
at Americans for Limited Government
asked another firm to analyze the list.
It turned out scl had handed them a
roster of die-hard Republicans.
Despite these early missteps, Cam-
bridge Analytica quickly signed on a
host of new clients thanks to the Mer-
cers, who leveraged their position as megadonors to effec-
tively strong-arm politicians into using their new firm. “It
was the Mercers that made people work with us,” an early
Cambridge employee told me. Cambridge boasted eight
clients at the federal level in 2013 and 2014, and members of
the Mercer family have supplied financial backing to each
of them, including to five during that election cycle. One
was former Ambassador John Bolton’s super-pac, a poten-
tial vehicle for a presidential run. During the 2014 midterms,
Robert Mercer gave $1 million to the group, which soon paid
Cambridge more than $340,000 to develop Cambridge’s per-
sonality-based targeting on the issue of national security. It
was an odd arrangement: Recipients of Mercer money would
turn around and pay a vendor partly owned by the Mercers.
(Rebekah Mercer did not respond to requests for comment.)
Cambridge Analytica’s work in the 2014 midterms re-
ceived mixed reviews. A consultant for Thom Tillis’ US
Senate race in North Carolina singled out for praise a
Cambridge contractor who had embedded with the cam-
paign. But in other instances, the firm’s seemingly weak
grasp of American politics turned off operatives. Once, a
Cambridge employee appeared unaware what a precinctwas. In another case, according to a prominent Republican
consultant, Cambridge proposed influencing Republican
voters living overseas by creating a model that targeted all
absentee voters, suggesting that the firm didn’t realize that
people who live in the United States can also vote absentee.
The most common criticism I heard about Nix was that he
habitually overpromised and underdelivered. According to a
person who worked with him, Nix had a saying: “Marketing
materials aren’t given under oath.” (Nix, Cambridge, and scl
did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story.)
But Nix and his company used their work helping to elect
Tillis and another Mercer-backed candidate, Tom Cotton of
Arkansas, as a steppingstone. Cambridge explored new cor-
porate clients, pitching the Colorado-based dish Network.
(“dish does not have, nor has it ever had, a business rela-
tionship with Cambridge Analytica,” a spokesman said.)
Perhaps inspired by Bannon, whom Wylie described to
the Washington Post as “Nix’s boss,” the company began
testing messages designed to tap into immigration fears,
anti-government sentiment, and an ainity for strong-
men—“build the wall,” “drain the swamp,” and “race
realism” (a euphemism for rolling back civil rights pro-
tections). It also surveyed opinions about Russian Presi-
dent Vladimir Putin. It seemed as if Cambridge was getting
ready for a presidential campaign—but which one?- “THEY’VE GOTTEN THE WOOL PULLED OVER THEIR EYES”
At 8:05 p.m. on March 22, 2015, Ted Cruz’s personal Twitter
account posted a message: “Tonight around midnight there
will be some news you won’t want to miss. Stay tuned...”
There wasn’t much suspense—Cruz had effectively launched
his presidential bid the day he arrived in the Senate two years
earlier, but now he would make it oicial.
At midnight, the senator’s team in Houston would turn
on the campaign website built by Cambridge Analytica.
Then, at 12:01 a.m....nothing. “We couldn’t even get the web-
site up,” one former Cruz staffer told me. Eight excruciating
minutes passed before Cruz simply sent another tweet: “I’m
running for President and I hope to earn your support!”
It was a harbinger of things to come. Interviews with
eight people who worked on the Cruz campaign reveal a
litany of disputes with Nix. As the campaign’s frustrations
mounted, it winnowed the number of Cambridge staffers
in Houston from 12 to 3.
Cruz’s campaign did, however, employ Cambridge’s psy-
chographic models, especially in the run-up to Iowa. Ac-
cording to internal Cambridge memos, the firm devised four
personality types of possible Cruz voters—“timid tradition-
alists,” “stoic traditionalists,” “temperamental” people, and
“relaxed leaders.” The memos laid out how the campaign
should talk to each group about Cruz’s marquee issues, such
as abolishing the irs or stopping the Iran nuclear deal. A
timid traditionalist, the memo said, was someone who was
“highly emotional” but valued “order and structure in their
lives.” For this kind of person, an “Abolish the irs” message
should be presented as something that “will bring more/re-
store order to the system.” Recommended images included
“Alexa n d e r
was always
entertaining,”
a former
colleague says.
“In the end, he
will always
hang himself.”