Free Republic

President Donald Trump. It's fair to say pollsters, political commentators and experts on both sides of the Atlantic didn't believe they would ever see that. And neither did I. If you listened to us all on the airwaves it was clear that most believed common sense would prevail and prevent someone so polarising and unpredictable being elected to the most powerful office in the world. But there was one expert in a TV studio that, if it had had a voice, would have been saying something like "I told you so". EagleAi was designed and built by Havas for ITV...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Ted Cruz's campaign manager, Jeff Roe, comments on what Trump can do at the Republican Convention to unite the party: Give Ted Cruz a prominent role. JEFF ROE: I would be remiss if I didn't point out that without data, without online fund raising, they kicked my butt anyway. That's on top of us raising $93 million, which was a record (at the time) for Republican primaries, getting eight million votes. Mr. Trump has a way to control the news cycle. I believe they will be able to put it together, but they have to get going now. The...

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - University at Buffalo Professor and Political Scientist James Campbell has done more then 20 years of research on political campaigns and strategy. Some of which are now guiding the Ted Cruz presidential campaign. The Ted Cruz campaign credits psychological data and analytics in its strategy so far. The campaign profiles and targets potential supporters and their concerns. They're also using a strategy targeting the "base" of supporters, or a guaranteed vote. It's something Dr. James Campbell says is nothing new. His research on this has been around for decades. He said, ""They're looking for anyway to...

Cruz has largely built his program out of his Houston headquarters, where a team of statisticians and behavioral psychologists who subscribe to the burgeoning practice of “psychographic targeting” built their own version of a Myers-Briggs personality test. The test data is supplemented by recent issue surveys, and together they are used to categorize supporters, who then receive specially tailored messages, phone calls and visits. Micro-targeting of voters has been around for well over a decade, but the Cruz operation has deepened the intensity of the effort and the use of psychological data. Cruz, a critic of excessive government data collection,...

Monitoring hundreds of millions of phone records is an extraordinary invasion of privacy. When Americans expressed outrage last week over the seizure and surveillance of Verizon's client data by the National Security Agency, President Obama responded: "In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother . . . but when you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance." How many records did the NSA seize from Verizon? Hundreds of millions. We are now learning about more potential mass data collections by the government from other communications and online companies. These are the "details," and few...

Moody's Analytics on Monday lowered its outlook for growth in the U.S. economy this year and next, saying it sees "significantly weaker" prospects for the economy than just a month ago as the country struggles to avoid another recession. The report ...cites the recent political wrangling over the U.S. debt ceiling and the revived debt crisis in Europe as leading factors in the bleaker economic picture. "The odds of a renewed recession over the next 12 months, already one in three, will increase if stock prices continue to fall