How To Undermine Democracy Using This One Simple Trick

At first, Tom Steyer’s late bid for the 2020 Democratic US presidential nomination hardly made a ripple in Washington DC. The little-known billionaire threw his hat into the ring on July 9, months after a crowded lineup of other Democrats had hit the campaign trail running. He seemed to drop in out of nowhere.

But within a matter of weeks, 62-year-old Steyer was polling at an astonishing 7% in early caucus and primarystates — surpassing Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke and other big-name contenders.He even managed to secure a spot on Tuesday’s Democratic debate stage, where he’ll debut his platform before an audience of millions.

Steyer told HuffPost he credits his success thus far to having a message that resonates with voters as “important, true and different”. But the environmental activist and liberal mega-donor’s stunning leap from relative obscurity to national prominencecan also be traced to a controversial campaigning tactic borrowed from President Donald Trump’s playbook: Funnelling big money into voter data collection and targeted digital political ads.

Since vowing to allocate at least $100 million of his own $1.6 billion fortune to his campaign, Steyer has already vastly outspent all of his competitors, and it’s paying off. So far, much of his money — more than $325,000 per day, according to The Wall Street Journal — has gone to political ads, including many that urged people to donate a single dollar to his campaign, quickly enabling him to hit the required 130,000 individual-donor mark. Millions of dollars worth of Steyer’s ads have also targeted voters in key statessuch asIowa, South Carolina and Nevada. He polled well enough in those three states to get into Tuesday’s debate.

Beyond strategic geographic targeting, Steyer has invested heavily in data collection on millions of potential voters, his aides told The Atlantic, which has allowed him to target people with thousands of digital ad variations based on their individual interests.

Steyer’s team described his campaign strategy to HuffPost as being “aggressive across all digital platforms”, but critics haveaccused him of trying to buy his way onto the presidential ballot. And although he almost assuredly won’t win the Democratic nomination for president, Steyer’s ability to so effectively customise his messaging for different audiences and to excel in certain states so late in the game by bombarding them with ads is alarming and illuminating: It reveals how little progress advertising giants have made in addressing the dangers of so-called “micro-targeting” in the wake of Russian ad-targeting campaigns during the 2016 US election, and just how vulnerable American democracy remains to the influence of deep-pocketed actors.

“Micro-targeting can affect election results and it can undermine democracy,” said Michela Redoano, a targeted-advertising researcher and associate professor at the University of Warwick in England. “Most voters aren’t even aware of micro-targeting. If you buy a newspaper of a certain political leaning, you know to expect bias. But if you’re on social media, people aren’t necessarily expecting bias in the ads they see.”