Trump’s Big Win Is a Giant Setback for Data Crunchers


Donald Trump has proven a lot of people wrong, and not just because a year ago today none of us—perhaps not even Trump—would have imagined in our wildest fever dreams that he would wake up May 4, 2016 as the presumptive Republican nominee.

It’s also because his win in Indiana last night, which prompted Ted Cruz to drop out of the race, suggests that data—the kind Cruz fastidiously gathered—might not matter all that much to a presidential campaign.

After the 2012 election, the prevailing theory was that data had been President Obama’s secret weapon against Mitt Romney. The campaign’s number crunchers sat in a separate space called The Cave, rubbing elbows with the likes of Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt and identifying key voters using an internal database named Narwhal. After Obama’s win, the occupants of the Cave got a lot of the credit, and strategists predicted that no candidate could ever win again without ample data on their side.

But those people were wrong—at least, Trump’s Indiana victory makes it look that way.[...]

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http://www.wired.com/2016/05/one-step-trump-one-giant-setback-data-crunchers/