Big Data politics? It’s an ancient trick, we’re just better at it (and China has more to come)

Efforts to get inside the minds of voters are as old as politics itself

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Cicero knew the first rule of politics: do anything and everything to win. Photo: Corbis

Published: 9:03am, 1 Apr 2018Updated: 12:04pm, 2 Apr 2018

When Marcus Tullius Cicero ran for the office of consul in Rome in 64BC, he brought in his brother Quintus as his adviser. Quintus apparently offered wise counsel and, according to the texts, was not above dirty politics. It’s unlikely that Quintus was the first political consultant in history, but his approach has survived the ages: do anything and everything to win.

In the past couple of weeks, there has been a chorus of political schadenfreude even though many of those taking the opportunity to shame Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are also relying on similar, if not the same, new political campaign methods. If they have not, they probably wish they had been. But the fact is that efforts to get inside the minds of voters are as old as politics itself. Today, the main difference is that, like almost everything else in modern life, campaigning is undergoing digitisation. Gut feeling and instinct is fast being replaced by algorithms and predictive modelling that help to reduce the guesswork (although don’t offer anything resembling certainty).

Facebook is taking flak, but many of its detractors are relying on similar methods. Photo: Reuters

For those, like myself, who work in the world of politics, communications and polling, the digital revolution offers benefits aplenty. We can crunch more data, we do it much quicker and computational advancements can help us to identify patterns and trends, often from a multitude of data sources. We rely on these new tools for everything – new product testing, YouTube video development as well as political and government campaigns.

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Political campaigns are often fascinating to outsiders but like with many things, it’s not great to see how the sausage gets made. Campaigns have traditionally been labour intensive – banks of call centres filled with students and housewives, campaign volunteers pounding the pavements and hundreds of others in back rooms crunching data and offering advice on everything from the right message to the right neck tie. But this is changing. Everyone involved in a campaign today has at least one smart device and all information is being synched in real time. Live digital dashboards have replaced whiteboards and sharpies.