Antisystemic campaigning: from addressing a crowd to targeting constituents

The Brexit and Trump campaigns obviously shared ideological traits.

Both focused on the perceived threat of immigration to national security, they fueled hostility towards elites of all kinds, they pushed the notion that democracies flourish in national constituencies alone, and consciously targeted the less educated and white working class voters.

Cambridge Analytica and Robert Mercer

There was also a technical infrastructure that they shared, and that is Cambridge Analytica.

The company’s CEO is Alexander Nix and its owner is the 70-year old US conservative hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. Mercer contributed $11 million to a pro-Cruz Super PAC and then, when he dropped out, he moved to donate $13,5 million to the Donald Trump campaign. Mercer is a major investor in the far-right media outlet Breitbart News Network, co-owned by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Now, the Guardian reports that Mercer also offered the services of Cambridge Analytica to Nigel Farage for UK’s June 23 referendum, free of charge.

In the week following the success of the Leave campaign in Britain, the Trump campaign hired the firm that once supported two of his rivals, namely Senator Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, the Daily Beast reported. Apparently, the company caught their eye because of the way they helped Ted Cruz win Iowa.

The success of the Leave campaign did not hurt either.

The technological edge

The company’s edge is its ability to “mine” micro-sentiment on social media to inform of campaign strategy, running so-called bottom-up campaigns. The effect of this approach is better knowledge of who the candidate is addressing and how to do so better than the opponent. In both campaigns, Cambridge Analytica mined fears, molding glove-fitting “protective messages”, and measured public responses.

The key to this success is the mastering of big data technology. But, we are not talking state of the art innovation. These are standard marketing tools that these campaigns have simply applied in a political context.

Cambridge Analytica takes pride in leveraging thousands of data points to elicit multi-variable information on millions of individual voters from social media usage and online surveys. Each voter is put through a filter of professional, political, consumer, and lifestyle behavior variables. Target groups are no longer broken down into “demographic groups” alone, but also “psychographic” groups, in terms of personality traits such as “openness,” “extraversion,” “neuroticism,” and the like.

The first big political question here question is not the fancy labeling. It is the privatization of an enormous amount of public data that comes from social media profiles, public sources, and perhaps also browsers. The ability to integrate the picture makes individual voters more predictable on a psychological rather than social level alone, which should be worrying.

The processing of this information has probably relied on another layer of technology, namely Artificial Intelligence. Mercer apparently started his career in IBM in the 1970s, working in language processing. Seemingly, Cambridge Analytics has applied similar campaign models for security agencies; after all, according to Steve Bannon, politics is war.

Psychotropic campaigning

For the purposes of political technologies, gone is the top-down targeting of people by means of standard messages. Both the Leave and Trump campaigns went aggressively after first-time voters, focusing on motivational and emotionally engaging factors, creating a constituency rather than trying to pick out a slice of the pie of usual voters.

This so-called “psychographic” approach differs from typical macro approaches to campaigns, in which parties mold their messages to appeal to “macro-groups” defined in terms of social, ethnic, and gender characteristics alone. Instead, each campaign is now sending bespoke messages to particular groups, whilst making informed decisions for "strategic" campaign decision.

A hint of the approach was provided by Aaron Banks, a major UKIP donor and Nigel Farage’s biggest supporter. In an interview with the Guardian on June 29, barely a week after the referendum, Banks made the point succinctly: “The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

That was months before the Americans went to the polls. But the Banks message was both describing the Leave campaign and the potency of the Trump message when he said that "if immigration wasn’t the issue, the issue was schools or education, {that is} proxies for immigration.”

To the Nigel Farage poster of Syrian refugees, portrayed as if readying for an invasion of Britain, Trump countered “lock her up.” To the “take back control” message of Nigel Farage, Trump countered “Build that Wall.” The effect of this message is a release to so many anxieties.

Sophisticated data mining was there not only to mold messages but also to pick up mistakes. For example, when the Leave campaign tweeted on Remembrance day that a Leave vote would honour those who fought for sovereignty in the two World Wars, there was widespread anger. Cambridge Analytica picked that up in time to remove the message before it did major damage.

However, the political message was not merely spin. Opting to address emotion is a technique, but to work with fear and hate alone clearly is the message. The medium is still the message.