While Cambridge got a lot of press coverage—both before the 2016 election and after it—post-election reporting has cast doubt on the effectiveness of Cambridge Analytica's methods.
The New York Timesreported last year that "Cambridge's psychographic models proved unreliable in the Cruz presidential campaign, according to Rick Tyler, a former Cruz aide, and another consultant involved in the campaign. In one early test, more than half the Oklahoma voters whom Cambridge had identified as Cruz supporters actually favored other candidates. The campaign stopped using Cambridge's data entirely after the South Carolina primary."
"After the Cruz campaign flamed out, Mr. Nix persuaded Mr. Trump's digital director, Brad Parscale, to try out the firm," the
Times added. "Its data products were considered for Mr. Trump's critical get-out-the-vote operation. But tests showed Cambridge's data and models were slightly less effective than the existing Republican National Committee system, according to three former Trump campaign aides."
But the biggest problem for the theory that stolen Facebook data was the key to Trump's election is this: according to a
March 2017 Times story, "Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign."
Other reporting around the same time reached the same conclusion.
Indeed, this becomes clear if you read that 2017 Motherboard article carefully. As an example of Trump's ad targeting techniques, Motherboard reported that "in the Miami district of Little Haiti, Trump's campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton."
You can debate whether this amounts to a political dirty trick or legitimate campaign criticism. But it's definitely not an example of cutting-edge psychographic profiling. Facebook offers every advertiser the ability to target ads based on conventional demographic criteria like race and ZIP code. This kind of message targeting didn't require using purloined Facebook user data to build psychographic profiles of voters.