Trump's wall is America's 'Brexit,' thanks to Facebook
Cummings, a former government education adviser who was so eccentric in real life that former Prime Minister David Cameron called him a "career psychopath," shocks the establishment politicians on his own side by relying entirely on data samples, not old-fashioned door-to-door or telephone polling.
One difference is that with the data approach much larger samples of potential voters can be "microtargeted" in population clusters categorized by age, income, gender, race and other categories overlooked by traditional polling.
We see a campaign created to learn what clusters of the electorate think about different issues. Users are given a chance to win an online bet (with odds almost too high for anyone to win) that includes pages of questions that reveal attitudes and emotions toward EU issues, which helps the campaign push out better-targeted anti-EU ads.
Depending on the person at whom they are aimed, ads would play up or play down fears of immigrants, dwindling funds for national health and other controversies. Predictable complaints were lodged against such tactics. But about 7 million people were targeted in the final 10 days before the Brexit referendum, the real-life Cummings has said. And, although his allies' polls told them they were making gains, Cummings avoided publicizing their apparent gains, so as not to provoke a larger turnout by pro-EU voters.
Watching the drama unfold in the movie, I was reminded easily of the shock that followed Trump's Electoral College victory and the anguish of apathetic liberals and moderates who wished they'd had gone out and voted against Trump when they had the chance.
That's the big lesson that's comes out of the Brexit and Trump victories. The growing political role of data science isn't going away soon, but two or more can play at this game. In fact, President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign used data mining so effectively that MIT Technology Review ran a three-part series on it that December.
Unlike the now-bankrupt Cambridge Analytica, Obama's allies later said, they collected data with their own app, complied with Facebook's terms of service and received permission from supporters first.
At the time, the use of user data was so new that hardly anyone paid much attention. Now everyone seems to be paying attention. Increasingly, we should. The campaigns definitely will be paying attention to us.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2019 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
