Big Data ana­ly­sis has been con­tri­bu­ting not only to decis­ion making in the busi­ness, health, and defense realms but also in poli­tics. Com­pu­ter experts have been hel­ping poli­ti­ci­ans under­stand the public beha­vior during elec­tion cam­paigns. In fact, Big Data insights played a cru­cial role in the recent US elec­tions, so news from the Israel Home­land Secu­rity Report.

New details show that the vic­tory of Donald Trump was due to an innate under­stan­ding of what the Ame­ri­can peo­ple wan­ted, on the basis of big data, rather than poles, accor­ding to ibtimes.co.uk. Cam­bridge Ana­ly­tica uses machine-lear­ning tech­ni­ques to iden­tify per­so­na­lity traits and was crea­ted spe­ci­fi­cally to work on US poli­tics. They use data mode­ling and psy­cho­gra­phic pro­fil­ing to grow audi­en­ces, iden­tify key influen­cers, and con­nect with peo­ple in ways that move them to action. The com­pany is the US affi­liate of the pri­vate Bri­tish beha­vi­oral rese­arch and stra­tegy com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pany SCL-Group.

The dif­fe­rent bet­ween a voter of Trump and a gene­ric Republican
Matthew Ocz­kow­ski from the SCL-Group, who ran the Trump data cam­paign in a talk with the IBTi­mes UK: “We were hired to under­stand how a Trump voter is dif­fe­rent from a gene­ric Repu­bli­can voter. Most model­ling is done on a typi­cal Repu­bli­can ver­sus a typi­cal Demo­crat, but we knew going into the race that Trump was any­thing but a typi­cal Repu­bli­can nomi­nee. He brings a very uni­que style and stance on issues, a dif­fe­rent bra­vado and name ID, so we built all our model­ling on who we should talk to and how we should talk to them spe­ci­fi­cally for his campaign.”
Ocz­kow­ski futher: “A typi­cal Repu­bli­can is con­cer­ned about jobs and eco­nomy, natio­nal secu­rity and then the size of the govern­ment tied with taxes. But if you look at a Trump-spe­ci­fic voter and you iso­late the ‘Trump effect’, the issue is quite dif­fe­rent. The big issues are law and order accor­ding to respect for law enforce­ment, immi­gra­tion, and trade and wages. Once you start to under­stand some basic things like this and then you under­stand the effect it will have on the electorate.”
He added that they unders­tood this elec­tion was going to be far dif­fe­rent from 2012. The Demo­crats weren’t spea­king to the right peo­ple. Hil­lary Clin­ton employed a stra­tegy like Obama in 2012, where all she had to do was turn out her own peo­ple and then she would win the election.

Tar­get ads on Facebook
Working with the Trump cam­paign team, Cam­bridge Analytica’s approach became focu­sed on how to get the disen­fran­chised voter to want to vote, and the data coll­ec­ted became honed into very spe­ci­fic, tar­ge­ted mini-cam­paigns. The com­pany focu­sed on paid ads on Face­book, because the social net­work had a huge reser­voir of data on mil­li­ons of users, making it pos­si­ble to tar­get ads at poten­tial voters who were angry about cer­tain issues.
The data firm told Trump to tra­vel out to hold “town hall” rally spee­ches in various sta­tes that cate­red spe­ci­fi­cally to the top con­cern of the group he was spea­king to. Even emails and door-to-door canv­as­sing were tail­o­red to suit the indi­vi­dual con­cerns of voters. Ocz­kow­ski argues that this approach enab­led Trump’s cam­paign to reach peo­ple, rather than try­ing to rely on instinct and pre­vious experience.
The ability to coll­ect and ana­lyze big data, then, can play a cru­cial role in important events and pro­ces­ses. iHLS is orga­ni­zing a Big Data Fusion Con­fe­rence and Exhi­bi­tion on Febru­ary 13th, 2017. Among the Topics dis­cus­sed at the con­fe­rence: Big Data Ana­ly­tics for the Intel­li­gence Mis­sion, big data in Law Enforce­ment, big data inte­gra­tion, big data cyber secu­rity and more.