It was eight years before this that I moved to England, where the story of my entanglement with Cambridge Analytica began. I’d worked in Canadian politics for a few years, but the irony is that I moved to London to escape politics. In the summer of 2010, I moved into a flat on the south bank of the River Thames, near the Tate Modern, the modern art museum housed in the colossal old Bankside Power Station. After several years in Ottawa, I had decided, at age twenty-one, to leave politics and move across the Atlantic to attend law school at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). No longer in politics, I was unshackled from my old responsibilities to the party. It didn’t matter anymore who I might be seen with, and I no longer had to watch what I said or think about who might be listening. I was free to meet new people and I was excited to make a new life for myself.
When I arrived it was still summer, and the first thing I did after unpacking was head out to sit with the sunbathers, tourists, and young couples in Hyde Park. I took full advantage of London, spending Friday and Saturday nights in Shoreditch and Dalston, and Sundays in Borough Market, London’s oldest food market, which is crammed into an outdoor hall alive with a cacophony of shouting traders, visitors, and cooking stalls. I started making friends with people my age, and for the first time, I felt young.
But a few days after I arrived, still feeling fuzzy from the jet lag, I got a call that made it clear that it wouldn’t be so easy to leave politics behind. Four months earlier, a man named Nick Clegg had become the country’s deputy prime minister.
First elected to the European Parliament in 1999, he worked his way up to become, in 2007, the leader of the Liberal Democrats. This was back in the days when the Lib Dems were the radical third party of British politics—the first to support same-sex marriage, and the only party to oppose the war in Iraq and call for abandoning Britain’s nuclear arsenal. In the 2010 general election, after more than a decade of Labour’s now tired “third way,” “Cleggmania” swept across Britain. At his peak, Clegg was polling as highly as Winston Churchill and positioned himself as Britain’s answer to Barack Obama. After the election, he became part of a coalition government that made the Conservative David Cameron prime minister. The call was from his office: They’d heard about my data work in Canada and America from mutual connections in liberal politics, and they wanted to know more.
At the appointed time, I arrived at Liberal Democratic Headquarters (LDHQ), which was then still located at No. 4 Cowley Street in Westminster. Located only a few blocks from the Palace of Westminster, the converted neo-Georgian mansion stood handsomely adorned in crimson brickwork and flanked by large stone chimneys on either side. It was rather outsize for the tiny, winding street, so I had no problem spotting it. Because it housed the offices of a party in Her Majesty’s Government, an armed unit of the Metropolitan Police stood guard nearby, strolling up and down the small side street. After being buzzed in, I heaved open the weighty wooden doors and walked up to reception, where I was greeted by an intern who would show me to the meeting. Still adorned with the manor’s original chandeliers, oak paneling, and fireplaces, the place revealed the faded elegance of a once grand residence, which felt oddly fitting for this once grand party.
Cowley Street, as they all called it, was unlike anything else I had seen in Canada or the United States. I wondered how all the party staffers waddling past one another in the cramped and creaking hallways could get anything done. Old bedrooms were jammed with desks, and cables connecting to servers were taped up on walls and around doorframes. In one converted closet, a man apparently with sleep apnea was snoring loudly on the floor, but no one paid him much attention. Looking around, I got the impression that this place operated more like an old boys’ clubhouse than a party in government. I walked up a large staircase with ornately carved railings and was shown into a large boardroom that must have once been the main dining room. After I’d waited several minutes, a small cadre of staffers filed in. When the obligatory British small talk concluded, one of them said, “So tell us about the Voter Activation Network.”
After Obama’s 2008 victory, parties all over the world were becoming interested in this new “American-style campaign,” powered by national targeting databases and big digital operations. Behind the campaign was the emerging practice of microtargeting, where machine-learning algorithms ingest large amounts of voter data to divide the electorate into narrow segments and predict which individual voters are the best targets to persuade or turn out in an election. The Lib Dems wanted to talk to me because they were unsure whether they could translate this new school of campaigning into the British political system. What was so interesting for them about the project I had worked on with the LPC—setting up the same kind of voter-targeting system used by the Obama campaign—was that it was the first of its kind and scale outside the United States. And Canada, like Britain, uses the same first-past-the-post “Westminster model” electoral system and has a diverse array of political parties. In this conversation, the staffers realized that half of the localization work would have already been done if they imported the Canadian version of the technology. At the end of the meeting, they were almost giddy after learning about what the system could do. After leaving, I ran back to school to catch the tail end of a lecture on the rules of statutory interpretation and thought that was the end of it.
But the Lib Dem advisers called again the next day, asking if I could come back and tell my story to a bigger group. I was in the middle of a lecture, so I didn’t pick up initially, but after four missed calls from a random number, I stepped out to see what was so urgent. There was a senior staff meeting that afternoon, and they asked if I could do an impromptu presentation on microtargeting. So after class, I walked from LSE back to Cowley Street with my backpack filled with textbooks. With such short notice, I didn’t have time to change, so I headed to meet the deputy prime minister’s advisers in a Stüssy graphic print T-shirt and camo sweatpants.
Walking into the same boardroom, I was met this time with the humming cacophony of a packed room. I was ushered to the front without any prompt, so, after apologizing for my slightly ridiculous attire, I proceeded to just wing it. I told them how the Lib Dems could use microtargeting to overcome the disadvantages that come with being such a small party. And as I continued, I couldn’t help but get more passionate. I hadn’t spoken about this since I left the LPC, and my heart simply poured out. I told them about what I had seen on the Obama campaign, what it was like to see so many people vote for the first time, what it was like to see African Americans at rallies filled with hope. I told them that this was not just about data; this was about how we could reach the people who had given up on politics. This was how we would find them and inspire them to turn out. But, most important, this was about how technology could be the vehicle that this party, which now found itself in the corridors of power, deployed to upend the entrenched class system that underpins so much of British politics.
A few weeks later, the Lib Dems asked me to come work for them and implement a voter-targeting project in Britain. I was just starting my degree at LSE, and, as a twenty-one-year-old student, I was finally finding my feet in London. I hesitated about whether it was really a good idea to distract myself with politics again. But here was a chance to take the same technology—the same software, and essentially the same project—and finish what I had started in Canada. But it was what I saw hanging so casually on the wall in one of the offices at Cowley Street that finally pulled me in. It was an old yellowing card, with slightly curled corners, with an excerpt of the Liberal Democrats’ constitution that read NO ONE SHALL BE ENSLAVED BY POVERTY, IGNORANCE OR CONFORMITY.
I said yes.
AFTER THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, I returned to Ottawa and wrote a report about the Obama campaign’s new technology strategies. It landed with a thud. Everyone was expecting me to tell them about the campaign’s flashy branding, graphics, and viral videos. Instead I wrote about relational databases, machine-learning algorithms, and how these things connected to one another through software and fundraising systems. When I recommended that the party invest in databases, people thought I’d lost my mind. They wanted sexy answers—not this. Obama was their benchmark for a “model” campaign, and they were taken with high cheekbones and pouty lips, not the skeleton and backbone that made it all possible.
Most campaigns can be boiled down to two core operations: persuasion and turnout. The turnout, or “GOTV” (get out the vote), universe is those people who likely support the candidate but do not always vote. The persuasion universe is the inverse, representing those who likely will vote but do not always support the party. People who are either very unlikely to vote or very unlikely to ever support us are put into an exclusion universe, as there is no point in engaging them. Voters who are both very likely to support the candidate and very likely to vote—these are the “base” voters, and they are typically excluded from contact, but they might be prioritized for volunteer or donor recruitment. Finding the right set of voters to contact is the name of the game.
In the 1990s American voters were generally targeted using data provided by local or state offices, which typically contained each voter’s party registration (if they had one) and their voting history (which elections they came out to vote in). However, the limitation to this approach is that not all states provide this information, voters change their mind more frequently than they change their party registration (or would not register a party), and this information would tell you nothing about the issues that actually motivate the voter. What microtargeting did was find extra data sets, such as commercial data about a voter’s mortgage, subscriptions, or car model, to provide more context to each voter. Using this data, along with polling and the statistical techniques, it’s possible to “score” all of the voter records, yielding far more accurate information.
What Obama’s campaign did was mainstream this technique and put it at the heart of its campaign operations. This is important because the organized chaos of campaign activity is typically not what one sees on TV, such as speeches or rallies. Rather, it is the millions upon millions of direct contacts made by volunteer canvassers or via direct mail to individual voters throughout the country. Although less sexy than a beautifully crafted speech or amazing branding, it is this unseen machinery that provides the critical horsepower of a modern presidential campaign. When everyone else is focused on the public persona of the campaign, strategists are focused on deploying and scaling this hidden machinery.
Eventually some of us in the Opposition Leader’s Office, where I was working in Parliament, realized we could show the party how useful the Voter Activation Network would be if we created a parliamentary version of it for the leader’s interactions with constituents and citizens. The party was unwilling to foot the bill for something so extravagant as a new database, but we realized we had room for it in the leader’s official parliamentary budget. The only problem was that these were technically public funds, and any pilot database we created could not be used for political purposes. But we were not too concerned. A parliamentary version would contain the records of constituents and citizens who had contacted the leader, and since constituents are simply voters with a different hat on, it would allow us to highlight all the same functionalities to the party without needing them to spend anything. Surely, after seeing such a system firsthand, the Liberal Party of Canada would begin to understand the potential of data. We asked Mark Sullivan and Jim St. George if they’d ever thought about expanding VAN internationally—to Canada. They hadn’t done any big projects outside the United States at that point, but they jumped at the chance to work with us. With the help of Sullivan and St. George, we were able to create a Canadianized VAN infrastructure in six months. To the party’s delight, VAN even worked in both English and French. There was only one problem: There was no data to actually fuel the system.
Computer models are not magical incantations that can predict the world—they can make predictions only when there is an ample amount of data to base a prediction upon. If there was no data in the system, then there could be no models or targeting. It would be like buying a race car but skimping on gasoline—no matter the car’s sophisticated engineering, it just wouldn’t start. So the next step was to procure data for VAN. But data was going to cost money, and because it would be used for campaigns, by law the party had to pay for it, not the leader’s parliamentary office. But almost immediately there was hard pushback from the party, which was not eager for change. I turned to the MP who first brought me into politics, Keith Martin. He had given me my first internship when I was still in school, and later my first real job, in the Canadian Parliament. Martin was often called the “maverick” of Canadian politics, and he staffed his office with mavericks, too. For me, he was a perfect fit. Martin trained as an ER doctor and spent his early medical career in African conflict zones, treating everything from land-mine injuries to malnutrition. This guy was legit cool and lived an amazing life before politics—on the wall in his office he had photos of himself looking like Indiana Jones in a khaki overshirt, sitting with leopards. As an ER medic, he was trained to not waste time, but in politics you survive by wasting time. He was once so incensed at the mechanistic procedures of Parliament that, mid-debate, he picked up “the Mace”—the gold-plated medieval weapon we inherited from Britain that lies in the aisle of the House of Commons.
In 2009, Jeff Silvester, Martin’s senior adviser, a former software engineer who’d turned his attention to politics, was one of the few people in the party who understood what I was trying to do. He was my mentor and my rock throughout my time at Parliament. I explained that even though the party hadn’t authorized me to move forward with the data targeting program, we needed to do it. And that meant we needed funding. With Martin’s approval, Jeff agreed to help me raise money without telling the party’s national office about it. We started holding secret events where I could explain to would-be donors that we needed this program if the LPC had any hope of being competitive in the twenty-first century. We did all this on the down-low, persuading people on the ground to put in money while the party staff weren’t paying us any attention. In short order, we raised several hundred thousand Canadian dollars, which was enough to get the program started. Dissatisfied with the national office, the British Columbia wing of the party agreed to be the guinea pigs in our experiment.
It was not clear whether any of this would work. In the United States, there are only two major parties, whereas in Canada there are five. This means that the dimensionality of what you are predicting for is no longer binary (Democrat or Republican) but multivariate (Liberal, Conservative, New Democratic Party, Green, or Bloc Québécois). With more options, you get many different kinds of swing voters (e.g., Lib-Con vs. Lib-NDP vs. Lib-Green, etc.) who can float their support around in many directions. There was also a far less developed market for consumer data in Canada and Europe, so many of the standard data sets in the USA either were not available or had to be pieced together from many sources. Finally, parties in other countries often have strict donor or spending caps. A lot of people were skeptical that microtargeting could even be deployed outside of America, but I wanted to try nonetheless.
I called up Ken Strasma, who ran Obama’s targeting operation in 2008, and asked if he’d be willing to help us set up a program in Canada. Strasma’s team in Washington, D.C., then built the models. The B.C. office in Vancouver pieced together useful data sets, such as old polling and canvassing data, and Strasma worked out how to deal with the additional complexities of multi-party politics. Volunteers all over the province were given either these new canvass lists to try out or old lists that would serve as controls. A sigh of relief came to the B.C. party staff as the results came in. As with many campaigns, the party uses persuasion canvasses to reach out to voters who have not yet made up their minds which party they will be supporting. By comparing the successful conversion rates (where a previously undecided voter declares support for your party) of the old lists with those of the new microtargeting lists, the B.C. operation was able to establish that the new targeting approaches had higher conversion rates. It was very exciting. We proved that what Obama accomplished in America would be possible in different political systems around the world. But when the national party in Ottawa found out what we had done, they objected to a national project. They wanted to run campaigns like Obama’s, but when shown how to do it, they refused.
I’d been drawn to politics because it seemed like a way to make a difference in the world, but after more than a year of banging my head against the wall, what was the point? Then came an intervention. In the Liberal Party, many of the secretarial staff came from a gaggle of older Québécois ladies, who had been around long enough to see how politics can transform someone. They took me to lunch in Gatineau, the French part of town just across the Ottawa River. After lighting up their cigarettes, they said, in their raspy, accented voices, “Listen, don’t become like us.” They told me they’d given their lives to the party, that the party had given them nothing in return except for “expanded waistlines and several divorces.” “Go, be young,” they said. “Get the hell out of here before it traps you.” And I realized they were right. At just twenty years old, I was already a midlife crisis waiting to happen.
I decided on the law school at the London School of Economics, as London was probably far enough from Ottawa—3,300 miles and five time zones across the Atlantic. I later learned that some of Canada’s party leadership had conflicted motives. The party still awarded many of its advertising, consulting, and printing contracts to firms owned and operated by senior party members or their friends. A new, data-centric approach might mean that “friends and family” in the party would lose out. In 2011, one year after I left Ottawa, the LPC was devastated in the federal election by the Conservative Party of Canada, which had invested in sophisticated data systems at the behest of its imported Republican advisers. For the first time ever, the Liberal Party was relegated to third place, with only thirty-four seats in Parliament. It was an historic defeat.
WHEN I BEGAN WORKING for the Liberal Democrats in London, it was for only a few hours a week, in between my classes at LSE. But almost right away I realized that, compared with the Obama campaign or even the LPC, the Lib Dems were a complete train wreck of a party. The office operated more like a stale curiosity shop than the heart of a political machine. The LDHQ staff were mostly bearded men in suits and sandals who spent more time chitchatting about the old Whigs than doing anything to mobilize their campaign. I asked to see their data systems, and someone told me about EARS, which stood for Electoral Agents Record System. “Wow, okay. This looks…old-school,” I said. “Was this made in the eighties?” It was like asking for a graphics demo and being shown one of those old Pong games. Someone told me that one of the systems had been designed during the Vietnam War.
It soon became clear to many in the party how superior VAN was to anything else available, and the party finally approved a contract with VAN to set up the data infrastructure. But now we needed data—the fuel to run the Ferrari. This was the step where the project had gone wrong in Canada, and the process went no more smoothly in the U.K. There is no national electoral register in the U.K.—it’s all handled by town councils—so we had to approach hundreds of different councils all across Britain to get their voter data. I’d be on the phone to Agnes in West Somerset, who would be like 105 years old and had probably been managing the voter rolls since women got the vote, asking her, “Do you have a digital copy of the register?” No, she’d say, because she kept the records as they’d always been kept, on paper, but I could see a copy in a bound book in the local town hall. Sometimes the local officials agreed to give us the data, sometimes not. Sometimes it was in electronic form, sometimes it was a PDF file, and sometimes it was just reams of paper that we had to feed into an optical scanner. Excel files would usually be emailed without a password—because why would anyone want to steal voter data?
The British electoral system was stuck in the 1850s, and, as I soon found out, so were the Lib Dems’ tactics. It wasn’t hard to understand why the party and its old Liberal Party predecessor had been on a losing streak since World War II. Leaders had lost touch with how to win and were utterly obsessed with handing out leaflets. These leaflets were called “Focus” and usually complained about parochial “local issues” like potholes or rubbish collection. The Lib Dems thought this was a clever way of “slipping in” their messaging to something that looked like a local newspaper. But there was a problem with the Lib Dems’ dollar-store Pravda: no one actually read it. Their idea of a voter was someone who spent their weekends flipping through mail order catalogs and political literature—political staffers are often so socially clueless, they forget that regular people have lives. Despite being the smallest of the three main parties, the Lib Dems had the most volunteers, because they were absolutely militant about shoving leaflets through doors, rain or shine. They would decide how many leaflets to deliver before even deciding what they should say in them.
In the world of hacking, the term “brute force” refers to randomly trying every possible option until you hit on the correct one. It doesn’t involve strategizing—it’s simply throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. That’s essentially what the Lib Dems were doing, spending tons of money on leaflets without targeting particular voters. Brute force is an unsophisticated hack, comically inefficient yet occasionally successful. There were certainly more effective ways to win elections. Yet when I tried to present alternatives to spamming voters with their upper-middle-class propaganda, complete with MS Word clip art, I would get a lecture on “how Lib Dems win” and the fabled Eastbourne by-election, in 1990—the surprise victory of the first MP to win as a Lib Dem since the 1988 SDP-Liberal merger—where they had apparently delivered a lot of leaflets. To question Eastbourne was like heresy. Fringe religions demand conformity, and the Lib Dems were no different. The party was a leafleting cult.
By-elections are irregular special elections, such as a vote to replace a member of Parliament who’s died. The Lib Dems were obsessed with them. For some reason, whenever the party won a by-election, members acted as if they’d conquered Britain with banners that proclaimed LIB DEMS WINNING HERE! But as part of my research, I decided to catalog every election and by-election since 1990 and found that the party had lost the overwhelming majority of them. “But what you are doing doesn’t help you win. It helps you lose. Here is the data,” I told them. “These are facts.”
Some of the party leadership listened, but most just seemed pissed off. They had their own cottage industry of being “election gurus” for the party faithful and weren’t keen on a newcomer strolling in and telling them how to fix their system. This did not bode well.
In the meantime, I started playing around with the voter data we had been able to collect from data vendors like Experian. I experimented with different types of sandbox models, similar to what I’d done in Canada. And something strange kept happening. No matter how I designed the models, I couldn’t build one that reliably predicted Lib Dem voters. I had no trouble doing it for Tories or Labour. Posh dude in some leafy rural township? Tory. Live on a council estate in Manchester? Labour. But Lib Dems were these in-between weirdos who resisted any neat description. Some of them looked Labour-ish and some of them looked Tory-ish. Ugh, what am I missing? I wondered if there was a latent variable at work. In social sciences, a “latent variable” is an element that is influencing a result, but one you haven’t yet observed or measured—a hidden construct that’s floating just out of view. So what is the hidden construct here?
One problem was that, at a basic level, I couldn’t visualize a Lib Dem voter. I could visualize Tories, who—in the most general sense—were either posh, rich, Downton Abbey types or working-class, anti-immigrant types. Labour voters were northerners, union members, council estate dwellers, or public-sector types. But who were the Lib Dems? I couldn’t imagine a path to victory if I couldn’t imagine who’d be marching with us on that path.
So, in the late spring of 2011, I started traveling around Britain to find out. For several months, I’d go to my classes at LSE in the morning, and then in the afternoon I’d hop on a train to places with delightful names like Scunthorpe and West Bromwich and Stow-on-the-Wold. My intent was to do voter interviews and focus groups, but not the usual kind. Instead of asking prepared, scripted questions, I’d have unstructured conversations, so people could tell me about their lives and what was important to them. I could have jumped directly to polling, but I realized that any questions I asked would be biased by what I, the questioner, thought was the most relevant thing to ask. Sure, I would get answers to the questions I added to the poll, but what if they were the wrong questions? I went to speak to people because I knew I was already biased and colored by my own experiences. I did not know what life was really like for an older British man living on a council estate in Newcastle, or a single mother of three in Bletchley. I wanted them to tell me what they wanted me to know about their lives, in their own words and on their own terms. So I got local constituency parties and polling firms to help randomly select people to speak to.
For the focus groups in smaller villages, there were often no addresses. I’d show up and be told, “We’re meeting in the cottage up on the hill. Just walk past the pub, through those fields with the daffodils, and after a while you’ll see it.” Random townspeople would show up, and perhaps Clive the local barman or Lord Hillingham the gentleman farmer would amble by. Sometimes I would just go to the village pub and chat with people there. British people were whimsical, nuanced, and often fun to chat with, and the focus groups reminded me of the town halls I had loved so much back in B.C. People would talk, and I’d just listen and take notes on what they had to say.
Through these many conversations I traveled alone, as the party was not terribly interested in what I was up to, but I started to piece together the randomness of the Liberal Democrats. What quickly became apparent was that they lived so many different lives. They were farmers in Norfolk in tartan hats. Hipsters being artsy in Shoreditch. Old Welsh ladies in the Mumbles or Llanfihangel-y-Creuddyn. Gays in Soho. Professors at Cambridge who hadn’t brushed their hair in twelve years. Lib Dem voters were an odd, eclectic mix.
They may have all looked different, but I noticed that they did have one common trait. Labour Party voters would say, “I’m Labour.” And the Conservatives would say, “I’m Tory.” But the Liberal Democrats would almost never say, “I’m Lib Dem.” Instead they would say, “I vote Lib Dem.” This was a slight but ultimately important distinction. It took me some thinking to figure out that it might have to do with the party’s history. The party wasn’t officially formed, in its modern incarnation, until 1988, after the merger of two smaller parties, which meant that many of its current voters originally came from historically Tory or Labour families. This meant that at some point in their lives, they’d had to make an active decision to switch from an old party to this new party. For them, supporting the Lib Dems was an act, not an identity.
ONE OF THE PEOPLE who drew me to London was Mark Gettleson, who quickly became one of my best friends. I had first met Gettleson in, of all places, Texas. Back in 2007, when I was just starting out at the LPC, they sent me to a Democratic Party event in Dallas to do some networking. I was milling about with hundreds of people in a giant ballroom, marveling at all the Stetson hats, when a clipped British voice behind me said, “Youuuu are not from here.” I turned around to see a bloke grinning like the Cheshire cat in forest-green trousers and a floral Liberty-print shirt. Between my bleached platinum-blond hair, complete with a classic mid-noughties fringe, and his dandified manner of dress, we were drawn together like two butterflies at a moth convention.
The son of a family of Jewish antique dealers on London’s Portobello Road, Gettleson is posh, eccentric, and delightfully camp and speaks with a delivery reminiscent of the actor Stephen Fry. In another time, he would have been a dandy in the salons of eighteenth-century London. He’s a polymath of the highest order. In conversation, he can draw connections between early-1990s hip-hop and the Franco-Prussian War without taking a breath. Gettleson and I vibed that night, and over the next couple of years I’d see him at various political gatherings in America or Britain. After I decided to move to the U.K., we immediately started to hang out, sometimes in the converted crypt underneath an old church that he’d somehow turned into a fabulous flat with bizarre antique miniatures and art lying around everywhere in a chaos that somehow worked. “I don’t do minimalism, Chris. I’m a maximalist,” he would say as I looked through all his objects.
I FLOURISHED IN LONDON and quickly gained a wide circle of friends. Although I was studying law at LSE and working at Parliament, most of my friends were a gaggle of club kids, dancers, queens, flamboyant creatives, and design students from Central Saint Martins, one of the world’s preeminent design and fashion schools, which had produced graduates like Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Stella McCartney. The thing that was different about Gettleson was that, like me, he seamlessly floated between all these different worlds. At the time, he was working for the London office of Penn, Schoen and Berland, the well-known Democratic polling firm that had most famously once been affiliated with the Clintons. He was the only person I knew who could join me for a formal reception on the Terrace Pavilion at Parliament, surrounded by cabinet ministers, and then end up with me later in the night decked out in makeup, glitter, and wigs, voguing among a heaving cavalcade of queens at a Sink the Pink glam ball. Gettleson was magnetic and all my friends adored him. As gentle as he was exuberant, he shepherded twinks on nights out like a collie shepherds lambs. They would find themselves completely mesmerized by his spontaneous use of Barbie dolls and character voices to explain why Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement failed—at 4 A.M. at the height of a thumping house party.
Gettleson was also one of the few people who understood what I was trying to do with data. One afternoon, as I was complaining about my difficulties in constructing a model for Lib Dems’ voting behavior, I told him I was thinking of asking some Cambridge profs about it. He connected me with Brent Clickard, who was completing his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at Cambridge and might be able to introduce me to some professors there. Clickard turned out to be so much more than simply a conduit to Cambridge. Like Gettleson, he was a dandy, the kind of guy who dresses in tweed and always has a crisp paisley pocket square. Though he came from a wealthy Midwestern American family, he spoke with a delightfully affected mid-Atlantic accent that he somehow picked up, as if he were playing a character in Casablanca. He’d been a dancer with the Los Angeles Ballet before deciding to move to England.
In the course of several boozy conversations, Clickard suggested I look more deeply into personality as a factor in voting behavior. Specifically, he pointed me to the five-factor model of personality, which represents personality as a set of ratings on five scales: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. With time and testing, the measurement of these five traits has proven to be a powerful predictor of many aspects of people’s lives. A person scoring high in conscientiousness, for example, is more likely to do well in school. A person scoring higher in neuroticism is more likely to develop depression. Artists and creative people tend to score high in openness. Those who are less open and more conscientious tend to be Republicans. This sounds simple, but the Big Five model can be an immensely useful tool in predicting voters’ behavior. In political discourse, you find that many of the phrases used to describe candidates, policies, or parties align with personality. Obama ran on change, hope, and progress—in other words, a platform of openness to new ideas. Republicans, on the other hand, tend to focus on stability, independence, and tradition—in effect, a platform of conscientiousness.
Reading in my flat in the middle of the night, I finally realized something. Maybe the Lib Dems didn’t have a geographic or demographic base; maybe they were a product of a psychological base. I put together a pilot study and found that Lib Dems tended to score higher on “openness” and lower on “agreeableness” than Labour or Tory voters. I realized that these Lib Dems tended to be, like me, open, curious, eccentric, stubborn, and a bit bitchy at times. This is how an artist in East London, a professor at Cambridge, and a farmer in Norfolk could all coalesce around this party in their own way, despite living very different lives.
The five-factor model was the key that cracked the Lib Dems code—and, in the end, provided the central idea behind what became Cambridge Analytica. The five-factor model helped me understand people in a new way. Pollsters often talk about monolithic groups of voters—women voters, working-class voters, gay voters. Although certainly important factors to people’s identities and experiences, there is no such thing as a woman voter or a Latino voter or any of these other labels. Think about it: If you randomly grab a hundred women off the street, will they all be the same person? What about a hundred African Americans? Are they all the same? Can we really say that these people are clones by virtue of their skin color and vaginas? They all have different experiences, struggles, and dreams.
Exploring the nuances of identity and personality started to help me unpack why, despite the fact that politicians do polling all the time, they still seem horrendously out of touch. This is because so many of their pollsters are out of touch. Polling firms influence politicians’ ideas of what makes up voter identity, which are usually horrendously oversimplified or just plain wrong. Identity isn’t ever a single thing; it’s made up of many different facets. Most people do not ever think of themselves as a “voter,” let alone curate an identity around how their worldview relates to tax policy. When a person goes grocery shopping, they are unlikely to stop, drop their shopping in a moment of blinding self-awareness, and suddenly realize in the middle of the store that they are, in fact, a university-educated white suburban female in a swing state. Whenever I was doing focus groups, people tended to talk about how they grew up, what they do, their families, what music they like, their pet peeves, and their personality—the kinds of things you talk about on a first date. Can you imagine how terrible a blind date would go if you were allowed to ask only the standard polling questions? Yeah, exactly.
IN LATE 2011, I broke the news to Nick Clegg’s team that I thought the party was in deep trouble. I explained that the data showed that Lib Dem voters were ideological, they were stubborn, and they hated compromise. But the party had become the antithesis of these attributes when it joined a coalition government with the Tories. The party was composed of uncompromising supporters, and yet it was operating in a government birthed out of compromising its principles. This type of compromise was a betrayal of Lib Dem voters’ ideals, and it was bound to drive people out of the party.
I put together slides and gave a presentation to Lib Dem leaders in an old wood-paneled committee room at Parliament. They’d been called together to hear an interim update on what I was finding and were excited to hear about what all this new technology was discovering. But their smiles quickly evaporated, as it was all very doom-and-gloom, describing in detail the tactical deficiencies in the party’s strategy. I created one slide showing that both Labour and the Tories had extensive data coverage of the voting population, meaning that they had quite a bit of data recorded for each voter, whereas the Lib Dems covered less than 2 percent of it. The report was damning and embarrassing, and no one wanted anything to do with it—or, ultimately, with me. It’s fair to note here that I can be a bit blunt at times and have a tendency to piss people off. I’m a bit like Marmite, the salty brown yeast extract British people smear on toast. People either love it or hate it, but no one is ever blasé about Marmite. Suffice it to say that the party stalwarts were not keen on having some random Canadian who looks like an intern sashaying in and telling them they’re doing everything wrong.
The one Lib Dem who listened was the chief whip, Alistair Carmichael. Carmichael is as Scottish as they come, hailing from Islay, the southernmost island of the Inner Hebrides. A native Scot who grew up speaking Gaelic in school, Carmichael talks with a Highlander brogue mixed with a more “proper” Edinburgh accent he picked up in his early years as a crown prosecutor. He is chatty and warm, and when I visited his office, he always invited me to join him in a tipple of whisky from his well-stocked cabinet. As a government whip, he was a hardened political machinator whose easy manner belied a profound understanding of the levers of power. His position as chief whip meant he’d seen and heard everything, so I turned to him for advice on how to move beyond the impasse I was experiencing in the party. I always felt like I could speak frankly to Carmichael, which he, as a man who did not have a fear of speaking his mind, respected. And he tried, unfortunately to little avail, to persuade the party staff to heed what I was saying.
All of this was beyond frustrating. I was showing them data, supplemented by peer-reviewed literature. I was showing them science. And they were responding by calling me pessimistic, problematic, not a team player. The last straw came when someone leaked my slides, apparently in an attempt to embarrass me. It backfired when a journalist wrote approvingly of my arguments, noting that the Lib Dems suffered from “the great leafletting problem” and were far behind the Tories and Labour in data collection and research. When you spend so much time researching voters and going out and meeting them, you grow more and more connected to them. I felt like my work was not just about winning an election; it was also about understanding what the lives of people were really like. It was about expressing and reiterating to those in power what it was like to be trapped by poverty, ignorance, or conformity.
Two years later, in 2014, the Liberal Democrats lost 310 council seats and all but one of their twelve seats in the European Parliament. The coup de grâce then came in May 2015, when the party was eviscerated, losing forty-nine of its fifty-seven seats in Parliament. With only eight Lib Dem MPs being reelected, their entire parliamentary caucus could have comfortably fit into a Mazda Bongo camper van.