Subject: Cruz firm readies for psychological ops at GOP convention | TheHill
From: "Bennett, Eric" <[email-masked]>
To: Comm_D <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2016 16:28:17 -0700

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/277758-cruz-firm-readies-for-psychological-ops-at-gop-convention

Cruz firm readies for psychological ops at GOP convention

A data firm working for Ted Cruz<http://thehill.com/people/ted-cruz> that claims to have a background in ‘psychological operations’ for foreign militaries could be the presidential candidate’s secret weapon in wooing delegates at the Republican Convention.

While Cruz’s staff have already proven adept at buttonholing delegates in convention halls around the country, another key part of the Texas Senator’s delegate-targeting operation involves the sophisticated use of technology.

On Tuesday, The Hill conducted a Facebook Live interview with Brittany Kaiser, the director of program development at Cambridge Analytica<https://cambridgeanalytica.org/>, a conservative-aligned data analytics and psychographic profiling firm that works for the Cruz campaign.

In the Facebook Live interview, Kaiser talks about the role of emotions such as fear in campaigns and how data can be used to get inside voters' heads.

“You’re really catering to the fears they already had,” Kaiser said, when asked about the role of fear in the presidential campaign. “It’s not really making them more scared or insecure than they already were.”

Cambridge Analytica is the offspring of a British firm, SCL, which claims a background in military-style “psychological operations." It has done counter-terrorism and human rights work for foreign militaries, NATO and the U.S. government.

Funded in part by Robert Mercer, a New York hedge fund manager who has given at least $11.5 million to a pro-Cruz super-PAC, Cambridge Analytica claims to be able to predict voters’ personalities and manipulate their behavior using 5000 data points. Kaiser said the firm had purchased every available data set in the U.S.

Kaiser is forbidden from discussing what the Cruz team at Cambridge Analytica are specifically working on, but she suggests the firm’s expertise in psychological profiling could help Cruz persuade delegates at the Republican convention to back the Texas Senator when they become unbound.

Cambridge Analytica has in the past done psychographic profiling on lawmakers who work on committees or sub-committees that are dealing with legislation that the firm’s clients require action on.

Using data to individually target the 2,472 delegates for a potentially contested Republican convention in Cleveland would be a similar exercise, Kaiser said.

“It’s a way of data-driven lobbying,” Kaiser said. “It could definitely be applied for the upcoming contested convention…understanding who’s in that room, who’s more persuadable, what they care about and what you need to talk to them about.

“I don’t work directly on the [Cruz] campaign,” she added, “but there are tons of us working on his campaign every day at Cambridge Analytica and I would be quite surprised if they didn’t make the most use of our technology in the upcoming convention.”

Asked whether Cambridge Analytica could use its military-style ‘psy ops’ on Donald Trump<http://thehill.com/people/donald-trump>, to expose and poke at the Republican front-runner’s psychological vulnerabilities, Kaiser laughed and nodded.

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“Hypothetically, yes indeed,” she said. “We definitely could.”

“I think this election cycle, if people do ask us to profile their opponents, we will be able to delve further into that than we ever have before…”

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