April 03, 2018 12:52 PM UTC

Still Want Cambridge Analytica's Help? They're Still Selling

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• by: Colorado Pols

Denver7 reports that embattled Republican-aligned “big data” analysis firm Cambridge Analytica is still soliciting business in Colorado politics–despite the swirling controversy surrounding their data sources and persuasion methods, and despite reported statements that the controversial company had no plans to play in American elections in 2018:

British data firm Cambridge Analytica continues to make overtures to political campaigns in Colorado – even as their work in the 2014 Colorado Senate race and in other campaigns, including President Donald Trump’s 2016 run, remains under heavy scrutiny.

Last week, a Washington, D.C.-based employee of Cambridge Analytica contacted the campaign of Doug Robinson, a Republican vying for the GOP nomination for governor this year…

In December, CEO Alexander Nix, who has since been suspended by the company, told Forbes the company was shying away from working in America.

“The company will grow significantly this year, even in the absence of chasing any U.S. political business,” Nix said at the time. [Pols emphasis]

From a simple bean-counting perspective, soliciting Mitt Romney’s Nephew to help with his campaign is a win-win with very little downside. In political consulting circles, a wealthy candidate with no real chance of victory is the perfect gravy boat: with money to burn and plenty of other factors to blame in the likely event of defeat. So there’s that.

On a practical level, though, there remains a perfectly good reason for Republican candidates to continue to enlist the services of Cambridge Analytica, scandal or no scandal: what they do appears to work at least to a degree. It’s true that the recent local news stories about Cambridge’s “psychoanalytic profiles” have featured Colorado voters disputing the personality scores Cambridge assigned to them, but Cambridge was still providing much more information to target voters than campaigns had at their disposal organically. Knowledge, even ill-gotten, is power. In 2014, the proof was in won races.

Just hope the voters don’t find out, because they’ve got real image problems these days.