Cruz-Connected Data Miner Aims to Get Inside U.S. Voters' Heads

I had spent about a half hour in the headquarters of Cambridge Analytica before I realized why my arrival at the tech firm—in a low-rise office building lodged inconspicuously on a dead-end service alley behind the Japanese Embassy, a block from Piccadilly—had been greeted so warmly. The company’s staff had been primed to attend to a psychological abnormality. “You’re in the top half percent of openness for everyone in Pennsylvania, which is quite stark,” marveled analytics director Alexander Tayler. “This is like a three-sigma event, to find someone that far out!”

I had traveled to London because the mysterious capability Tayler showcased with his welcome—to segment the American electorate not only by ideological predisposition but also by individual psychological characteristics—amounts to the most audacious new analytical innovation foisted on American politics this year. Of the thousands of companies making money off the presidential election, Cambridge Analytica also boasts the most compelling patrimony. Despite being a new arrival to American politics, it is an offshoot of an established British firm, SCL, which made its name advising governments and militaries on what it called “psy ops.” Even when it rebranded itself to compete for American political clients, as a specialist in profiling individuals’ personality characteristics in order to better tailor messages, SCL, curiously, chose not to obscure its foreign heritage. Instead, the company swathed itself in an exaggerated Anglophilia, calling itself Cambridge Analytica. The firm initially kept a low profile in the U.S., but was outed as a vendor to Ted Cruz’s campaign in July, when Politico reported that its investors included the family of Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge-fund investor who also happened to be one of the most generous donors to Cruz’s super-PAC. Mercer wasn’t talking publicly about his investment, but I could understand why someone with a background as a coder and a willingness to spend down his net worth, millions at a time, to support conservative causes was drawn to the company. Amid the appetite for high-tech innovations in Republican campaigns, Cambridge Analytica could claim it was not merely matching the Democrats—it was going where the opposition had not.