The Trump Campaign And Cambridge Analytica

3. U.S. Presidential Election of 2016: The Trump Campaign & Cambridge Analytica
The controversially sardonic republican Donald Trump dominating the stage with immoderate statements on immigration and foreign policy, winning him a presidential election in the world’s most powerful and influential country is rather stranger than fiction. Trump’s remarkable rise from a mere political perspective to a trend, as seen in other Western countries, where outspoken outsiders have challenged and even defeated the political elite is simply unbelievable. His opposition, the democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, was someone with a high political pedigree as a former Secretary of State and US senator, and the then incumbent president Barrack Obama’s backing.

Cambridge Analytica focussed its efforts on persuadable voters by providing valuable information to the Trump campaign’s activities in getting them to vote for him. This was how they identified swing states in the election and got Trump to hold rallies there.
• Cambridge Analytica produced heat maps of persuadable voters, voters who had not made the decision yet. For instance, the state of Wisconsin. Wisconsin is a state that is traditionally a very safe democrat seat. So much so that the Clinton campaign never visited the state of Wisconsin in the entire election. Nevertheless, they were able to use data to identify that there were very large quantities of persuadable voters there that could be influenced to vote for the Trump campaign, and had five rallies there.
• An Electoral College is not an easy one for any candidate in the race. The candidate could lose the popular vote and still be the president because of Electoral College votes. This is what happened in the case of Trump’s election. The digital team built a model, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory”; to weigh and rank the states that the data team (Cambridge Analytica) believed were most critical to amassing the 270 electoral votes Trump needed to win the race. On oct.18 2016, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia were top on the list, all of which Trump went on to

Cambridge Analytica was undertaking 3000-4000 thousand polls a month in order to inform reporting dashboards to help the campaign understand its resource allocation and to inform their predictive models about the audiences they needed to engage. The weekly polls provided a very powerful insight into tracking the electorate. When Trump’s Access Hollywood tape with Billy Bush was broadcast on national television, his ratings went down in some states while went up in others. Therefore, the digital team was quick to communicate this to the campaign and thereby they could allocate resources in a targeted