Sources on how Cambridge Analytica milked Mercer-backed GOP candidates, including Cruz campaign, which paid $5.8M and compared the firm to a Ponzi scheme
The secretive data firm said it could move the minds of American voters. That wasn't its real victory. — Looking for news you can trust? Tweets: @clarajeffery , @clarajeffery , @mattkmoore , @persuasivepr , and @politicoryan Tweets: Clara Jeffery / @clarajeffery : 3/ “Nix the salesman is an artist, to be honest,” one told me. Another referred to him as a “chancer,” the British term for a consummate opportunist. “He'll always be like, ‘Can I give it a go? Can I sell this to you and work out the details afterward?’” Clara Jeffery / @clarajeffery : 2/ Here are some quotes from people who worked with or for Cambridge Analytica: “It was like an internal Ponzi scheme” “They're just full of shit, right?” “Marketing materials aren't given under oath.” Matthew Moore / @mattkmoore : Cool-headed and well-informed piece on the actually very minor role Cambridge Analytica played in Trump campaign. Essentially: flaky, incompetent chancers http://www.motherjones.com/... @persuasivepr : “In Aug 2015, one of Cambridge consultants came clean. Ripon “doesn't exist,” he said, according to former Cruz staffers. “It'll never exist. I've just resigned because I can't stand lying to you every day anymore.” “It was like an internal Ponzi scheme,” a Cruz campaign official http://twitter.com/... Ryan Heath / @politicoryan : This is quite the Cambridge Analytica story by @motherjones - indicated via primary sources that Facebook knew in 2015 about CA's data-scraping of friends of people who took the quiz, and simply accepted CA's word the data had been deleted http://www.motherjones.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The myth of Cambridge Analytica was built in stages: first the personality profiles assembled from Facebook quizzes and consumer data, then the firm's own claim that its models were so complete they no longer needed fresh Facebook data. What was never independently verified was whether any of it moved votes.
This Mother Jones reporting supplies the missing ledger: sources describe a firm that treated Mercer-backed GOP clients as a revenue stream, with the Cruz campaign paying $5.8M and one official comparing the operation internally to a Ponzi scheme. It lands days after Facebook's forensic audit of the company stalled at the UK ICO's request, leaving regulators without an independent read on the firm just as its client-side record comes into focus.
First-order effects
- The Cruz campaign is out $5.8M for services its own officials reportedly considered hollow, and every other Mercer-aligned GOP client now has to answer for what it bought and why.
- Cambridge Analytica's core sales pitch — that it could psychologically move American voters — is directly contradicted by the people who worked inside its deals, collapsing the premium pricing that pitch supported.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's stalled audit becomes harder to defend: with former clients describing the firm as a billing machine, the platform faces renewed pressure to produce its own accounting of what Cambridge Analytica actually did with scraped friend data.
- GOP campaign vendors and consultants who compete for the same donor-funded budgets can now position against 'psychographic targeting' as unproven, redirecting spend toward measurable ad-tool execution like the Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences work credited in the Trump campaign's operation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — big claims, thin delivery, wealthy patrons footing the bill — political data firms get priced and procured like any other agency service, with campaigns demanding demonstrated ROI instead of personality-profile mystique.
- Regulators left holding an incomplete audit trail (the ICO-halted review, the later leak of internal docs spanning dozens of countries) have a structural case for mandating disclosure of political-data contracts rather than relying on voluntary cooperation.
The trend: Political data targeting is moving from unverifiable psychographic promises toward auditable, platform-native ad execution, with client disillusionment and regulatory scrutiny forcing the shift.