MAY JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 29“a family having a nice moment together, with
a smaller image representing Washington off to
the side—representing that a small state makes
for better private moments.” But for a tempera-
mental type, the suggested image was a “young
man tossing away a tax return and taking the key
of his motorbike to head out for a ride.”
Almost two months before the Iowa caucus,
the Guardian reported that Cambridge and
the Cruz campaign were using unauthorized
Facebook data—an early indication of what
Chris Wylie would later reveal in full. In re-
sponse, Facebook told Cambridge to delete any
Facebook data it held. Wylie says that while he
deleted the data in his possession, he merely
filled out a form and sent it back to Facebook
certifying that he’d done so. Facebook, he adds,
never verified whether he actually had. A former
Cruz staffer told me that well after the Guardian
report, he could still use Cambridge’s Facebook
data to build voter models.
The Cruz campaign eked out a victory in
Iowa, and Nix was quick to take credit during an
interview on Fox News. Whether Cambridge’s
psychographics played any part in Cruz’s win
is debatable: When the firm began using these
techniques on December 1, two months before
the caucus, Cruz was polling at 28 percentage
points in Iowa. From there to caucus day, his
numbers fluctuated between 23 and 32 percent.
Contrary to Nix’s claim that Cruz was languish-
ing in the single digits until Cambridge came
along, the candidate was already well on his
way to winning when Cambridge’s secret sauce
kicked in. “If we weren’t using the personality stuff until
that point in time,” a former Cruz oicial says, “then Nix
can’t credibly make the argument that it mattered, right?”
Adding to suspicions about whether Cambridge’s per-
sonality profiling worked as claimed was the fact that the
company refused to share any of its underlying models. Cam-
bridge advised the campaign on how best to deliver Cruz’s
message to “stoic traditionalists” and “relaxed leaders,” but
it wouldn’t divulge how it came up with those personality
types in the first place. “They’re the least transparent com-
pany in the business,” a former Cruz staffer told me. Nor
did Cambridge seem to understand the fundamentals of
how a presidential campaign operated: Two weeks out from
the South Carolina primary, Cruz’s data team discovered
that the company hadn’t updated the voter database feed-
ing its models in seven months. The result: In a primary
where the victory margin could be in the low thousands,
there were 70,000 people Cruz wasn’t targeting because
his data was stale. “How fucked up is that?” the former Cruz
staffer told me. “That’s political malpractice.” Cruz finished
third in South Carolina. After the opening four states, he
stopped using Cambridge’s personality-profiling models.
The company’s lackluster performance on the Cruz cam-
paign didn’t stop Nix from walking onstage at the Con-
cordia Summit and taking credit for Cruz’s second-place
finish in the nomination fight. Word of his speech spread
in Cruz circles, and campaign alums watched the video
of Nix and scoffed. “Most of that’s bullshit or things we
designed on the campaign,” one senior Cruz staffer told
me. “Everybody has respect for the Mercers. But they’ve
gotten the wool pulled over their eyes.”- “THE PHENOMENON DONALD TRUMP”
The Cruz campaign was still in the process of unwinding
when Cambridge, following the lead of its investors, the
Mercers, offered its services to the Trump campaign. Cam-
bridge had previously reached out to Trump’s team, but
his advisers didn’t want to hire the firm if it was also work-
ing for his rivals. Now, this was no longer an issue. Nix
sent three employees to Texas to meet with Brad Parscale,
Trump’s head of digital operations, who had no political
experience and had gotten to know the Trump family
while building websites for their company. (Parscale was
recently named Trump’s 2020 campaign manager.)
As Nix courted the Trump campaign, he came up with
an idea to boost the gop nominee-in-waiting—one that