some twitter extracts https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1313872314245808128
> The ICO found Cambridge had more or less the same tech in the 2016 campaign that competitors did—and even within the company, staff worried that Nix & Co. were exaggerating CA’s “impact and influence.”
> All those things you read about the thousands of data points CA had on American voters? Most of it was commercially available to anyone with the $. Points to larger issues of data & privacy but not something unique to CA.
It's one of the reasons for why third parties can't break into the American system - it's hard to compete without access to a curated-over-decades dataset of likely voters, swing voters, potential volunteers, single-issue voters, etc, etc.
[0] Nominally. In practice, the commonality of ideas between elected Democrats and Republicans, combined with structural advantages that give the GOP a disproportionate hold on power, mean that the US is more of a 1.5 party system.