Ahead of the midterms, US political campaigns are using voter-profiling companies and vast amounts of data to target campaign ads on guns, vaccines, and QAnon
even a “Trump resistance” score. Yes, you too may have a “QAnon Believer” score. https://www.nytimes.com/... Julia Rosen / @juliarosen : The one when the NYT discovers models and scores. Decade late there fellas. https://www.nytimes.com/... Dean Eckles / @deaneckles : Interesting coverage of contemporary and past voter targeting. Perhaps notable that Cambridge Analytica now gets only a brief mention, and that (to me at least) the piece isn't written in a particularly ominous way. “Check Your ‘Trump Resistance’ Score” https://www.nytimes.com/... Nils Gilman / @nils_gilman : I confess that my reaction to articles like this is pretty much a giant “meh.” This is just Market Segmentation 101, applied to political choice-making. If you don't like being treated like a predictable robot, then stop acting like a predictable robot. https://www.nytimes.com/... Natasha Singer / @natashanyt : Voter surveillance, of course, is hardly a new practice. In 1840, Abraham Lincoln co-authored a circular for the Whig Party instructing local party committees to “keep a CONSTANT WATCH on the DOUBTFUL VOTERS” in their districts and target them with persuasion efforts. https://twitter.com/... Ulrike Franke / @rikefranke : “The process can involve classifying more than 150 million voters — using ratings like “gay marriage” scores or “non-Christian” scores — on personal beliefs they might have assumed were private.” https://www.nytimes.com/... @kashhill : Ad-targeting firms are now scoring American voters for “qanon believer,” “UFO distrust,” “racial resentment,” “Trump resistance.” Love that @natashanyt included this 1840 campaign circular (that Abraham Lincoln helped write) on steering the undecided. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Six years after [[a:878234|Cambridge Analytica built psychological profiles of Facebook users from quizzes and consumer data]], the practice has not shrunk — it has normalized. The New Republic documented in 2018 that political data firms kept vacuuming up psychological data after the scandal, and Trump's campaign spent roughly $20M on 218K+ Facebook ads designed partly to harvest user data in 2019.
What is new in this report is scale and symmetry: profiling vendors now classify roughly 150 million voters with named scores like 'QAnon Believer' and 'Trump Resistance,' and both sides use them — Acronym was already building an ex-Facebook-staffer operation to turn Trump's online ad tactics against him before the last cycle.
First-order effects
- Campaigns buying these scores can target ads on guns, vaccines, and QAnon at individuals by belief profile rather than party registration, making the profiling vendors direct infrastructure for the midterm ad spend of both parties.
Second-order effects
- Because the tactic is now bipartisan — Acronym's mirror of Trump's playbook proved it — neither party has an incentive to push platform or regulatory restrictions on political microtargeting, and Facebook and other platforms face continued demand for the granular ad formats that make scoring profitable.
Third-order effects
- If scoring 150 million voters becomes standard campaign procurement, voter profiling consolidates into a permanent industry that outlives any single scandal — Cambridge Analytica collapsed as a brand while its methods became table stakes, pointing toward regulation aimed at data brokers rather than individual campaigns.
The trend: Political persuasion is shifting from demographic targeting to scored psychological profiles held by commercial data vendors, with each election cycle normalizing what the previous scandal exposed.