WHO, APART FROM those who have watched “The Great Hack” on Netflix, has ever heard about what happened in Trinidad & Tobago in 2010? Oh yes, the people who brought us Brexit and Trump didn’t just explode onto the international stage in 2016 like some pantomime demon, they’d had lots of practice.
In Trinidad & Tobago the shadowy, data-mining, political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, played a truly diabolical trick on the nation’s voters. In a nutshell, it’s CEO and founder, Alexander Nix, surreptitiously created “Do So”: an online campaign dedicated to radical non-participation in the country’s political system; especially its electoral process.
Careful data analysis had revealed stark behavioural differences between Afro-Caribbean youth and young members of the Indo-Caribbean community. The radical non-participation message resonated loudly with the Afro-Caribbeans, but nowhere near as decisively with the more dutiful children of the Indo-Caribbeans.
That was all the governing Indo-Caribbean party needed. The dramatic drop in the Afro-Caribbean vote in the general election of 2010 – almost all of it attributable to the effects of Nix’s “Do So” campaign – was enough to secure the incumbent a narrow victory. As Nix boasted to a gathering of potential Cambridge Analytica clients shortly afterwards: “We are a behaviour change agency.”
All very well and good, but there’s a huge difference between electing prime ministers and presidents in places like Trinidad & Tobago, Malaysia, Romania, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and even India, and messing with the futures of the United Kingdom and the United States. Nix and his data-miners should have stayed in the Third World, where no one in the mainstream western media pays much attention to how elections are lost and won. But, organising international shocks like Leave’s victory in the Brexit referendum, and Donald Trump’s unlooked-for triumph in the 2016 US presidential election: that is a different matter. Pull off something that big and people are bound to start asking questions.
It’s likely that Scott Morrison’s surprise win in the 2019 Australian general election will be the last time the techniques made possible by Cambridge Analytica, and turned to astonishingly effect by campaign wizards like Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon, can be used without the news media cottoning-on – and ruining things.
Television productions such as “The Uncivil War” and “The Great Hack” have alerted even the dimmest political journo to the fact that elections are being fought in a new way. The decidedly dodgy aircraft that flew under the radar in 2016 and 2019 are going to be identified quickly and tracked relentlessly by just about everyone in 2020.
In “The Uncivil War”, when Benedict Cumberbatch, playing Cummings, tells his opposite number in the Remain campaign: “There’s a new kind of politics in town – one which you can’t control.” He was telling the truth. Three years later, however, as the UK spirals towards a No Deal Brexit and/or a snap general election, Cummings politics is no longer new. Everybody who abhors Brexit, Trump, Morrison and Johnson will not only do everything within their power to control it but also to smash it up.
All of which raises some interesting questions about whether or not Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett are aware of the risks attached to re-running the Brexit/Trump/Morrison strategy in New Zealand in 2020.
How aware are they of the danger that next year’s election campaign could end up being hijacked by journalists running stories about the way the major parties are conducting their campaigns, rather than reporting on the content of those campaigns? Have they considered the likelihood of Nicky Hager devoting his inevitable election year book to the way National and Labour have gone about collecting political data, and about how they intend to use that information to target specific messages to specific demographics, using voter’s electronic devices?
What effect would such reporting have on the number of voters supporting the two major parties? Could 2020 end up being a repeat of 2002 – when National slumped to its lowest ever vote and support for the minor parties soared?
Bridges and Bennett would be wise to register the fact that there is already an unusual amount of interest in the mechanics of online political influence. The whole Press Gallery is aware of the deep impression Morrison’s hard-hitting campaign made on Bridges, and they are keeping a sharp lookout for the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t, social media blitzing perfected by Sean Topham – the young Kiwi tyro who created the short, sharp and funky ads that helped Morrison win the Aussie election.
The other give-away, already noted by political journalists, is Bridges’ enthusiastic embrace of the politically divisive, heart and gut issues that lend themselves so well to moving uncertain voters in the ‘right’ direction. But, some National Party watchers are asking themselves whether Bridges actually has what it takes to ride the populist tiger to electoral victory and beyond. Jumping on this beast’s back is one thing – getting off safely, quite another.
A precedent, of sorts, is there in the career of Rob Muldoon. In many ways, the campaign he unleashed against the Labour Party in 1975, was every bit as devastating as Cummings’ and Bannon’s triumphs. He, too, had a Cambridge Analytica – or, at least, its 1970s equivalent. No one in New Zealand had ever encountered anything like the party political cartoons that defined the 1975 election campaign. The only thing observers of the time agreed upon was that they were not made in New Zealand!
But that was the point. No one saw National’s lightning-bolt coming. And that’s not going to be the case if Bridges attempts to pull the same rabbits out of the same hats as Cummings and Bannon. Too many people in the audience know how the Brexit/Trump/Morrison trick is done and will be only too delighted to explain the ‘magic’ to everyone who doesn’t.
To win in 2020, Bridges and Bennett need what Cummings managed to smuggle into town in 2016: a new kind of politics. One which Labour not only can’t control but doesn’t even know has arrived.
Bridges appears to believe he’s got it.
We shall see.