Is the Republican Party's Killer Data App for Real? - Bloomberg Politics

In other political data analytics news, see Politics and the New Machine: What the turn from polls to data science means for democracy (The New Yorker)

"Cambridge Analytica’s trophy product is “psychographic profiles” of every potential voter in the U.S. interwoven with more conventional political data. The emphasis on psychology helps to differentiate the Brits from other companies that specialized in “microtargeting,” a catch-all term typically used to describe any analysis that uses statistical modeling to predict voter intent at the individual level. Such models predicting an individual’s attitudes or behavior are typically situational—many voters’ likelihood of casting a ballot dropped off significantly from 2012 to 2014, after all, and their odds of supporting a Republican might change if the choice shifted from Mitt Romney to Scott Brown. Nix offered to layer atop those predictions of political behavior an assessment of innate attributes like extroversion that were unlikely to change with the electoral calendar."

Is the Republican Party's Killer Data App for Real? - Bloomberg Politics