How Donald Trump 'Quietly' Used Big Data Analytics In His Presidential Campaign

Back in what now seems like a different world – before last year’s US election – I published an article called “Is Big Data Donald Trump’s Achilles Heel?”

The gist of my thoughts was that, based on what we knew at the time, it seemed that Trump had little interest in running the type of Big Data-driven, analytical election campaign that had propelled Barack Obama to the presidency (and indeed was being enthusiastically deployed by his rivals).

I speculated that this apparent lack of interest beating his opponent at the data-crunching game was likely to be a hindrance at the last leg of the contest, when he would be in a head-to-head race with a Democrat with access to the same data and technology as Obama had at his disposal.

Well, it turns out that what I (or most other people) didn’t know was that Trump – while vocally proclaiming that he thought personality, not processing power would win the election – would just weeks later quietly engage the services of data analytics providers Cambridge Analytica. [Office1] I say “quietly” as this was actually done by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, through a group he set up to campaign on Trump’s behalf.

Kushner is said to have been the brains behind Trump’s election technology strategy but is also a recent adoptee of Big Data. He became aware of the power of online marketing while experimenting with Facebook targeted advertising, and noticing how quickly he could increase sales of his father-in-law’s branded merchandise by a factor of 10 – from $8,000 to $80,000 per day – simply by refining the target demographic.[Office2] 

Trump’s data campaign followed a different strategy than the Democrat one which had been credited with playing a large part in securing the last two elections. Obama’s operation focused on identifying swing voters who could go either way, in areas with a likelihood of high voter turnout. Trump’s campaign, on the other hand, centered around deciding which of his key political platforms – for example cutting immigration or “draining the swamp” of corrupt or incompetent politicians and bureaucrats – would work best with segmented voter groups. Once up and running at the end of the summer, it was soon sending out tailored messages to 100,000 targeted voters every day[Office3] .

It appears that Trump – or rather Kushner – did something pretty smart here. Trump’s fondness for expressing his opinions plainly to a huge audience over social media meant that reactions to what he said – good or bad (and there were always plenty of both) could be monitored in real-time. By matching the demographic information of people who reacted well to certain messages on social media to voter information in the Republican Party’s databases, his campaign could work out exactly where to target their message, for the minimum expense.

Whatever you think of Trump’s policies and his election strategy it was an impressive coup. Blindsiding his opponent into thinking she had the data game sewn up, Trump himself reaped the benefits of continuing to play the part of the techno-sceptic “everyman” in front of his largely blue collar supporters. In reality, he had quietly left the critical work to someone in a better position to know what they were doing.

Predictably, in the wake of Trump’s victory, some commentators were quick to paint the surprise result as something of a victory of man over machine. Voters were still more likely to respond to the “common touch” – issues which affect their lives expressed in a way which they understand, and in view of how things turned out, it would be foolish to suggest there is no truth in this.

As time has passed though, and journalists and analysts have begun to make some sense of how the biggest upset in modern American politics came to take place, it is clear that Trump’s campaign, once he realized he had a real shot at the presidency, was far more data-savvy than many people had thought. As always, let us know your thoughts and views in the comments below.

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