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Over the years, some of America’s most iconic gun-holders handed over sensitive personal information about their customers to the leading lobbying groups in the gun industry. Political operatives then adopted these details to bring together firearm owners and elect pro-gun politicians who would run for Congress and the White House.
The strategy has remained a secret for over 20 years.
In a series of stories over the past few months, Propublica has used a pile of gun industry documentation and insider interviews to uncover the internal workings of the National Shooting Sports Foundation project.
In the 2016 election, the NSSF also demonstrated how to work with controversial political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to turbocharge outreach to gun owners and others.
Additional internal Cambridge reports obtained by Propublica detailed the full scope and depth of refinement and intrusion of the Pursuasion campaign.
Political consultants have analyzed thousands of details about people’s lives in the vast database of NSSF. Were they a shopping addict? Did they gamble? Did women buy plus size or petite underwear?
Alchemy had three phases.
Phase 1
Data accumulation
Some of the data excerpted here was basic information found in the census, such as marriage status status and ethnic groups.
However, the data also contained much more specific information about a person’s aesthetic preferences, purchasing habits and hobbies.
Other data highlights consumers’ personal opinions, history and even maliciousness.
The way Cambridge transformed these small data into a massive political victory has never been made public. The method raises disturbing questions about how we can use our personal data to manipulate us.
“There’s a natural desire to stay anonymous and to keep your own information. This is a violation of that,” said Calli Schroeder, privacy specialist at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The NSSF states that “activities are within the terms of an individual manufacturer, company, data broker or other entity, and have always been perfectly legal and have been in the past.” Larry Keene, senior vice president of NSSF since 2000, said the trade group’s 2016 voter outreach campaign only includes commercially available data.
However, according to Cambridge’s email and a report on the NSSF campaign, the data contained 20 years of information on gun buyers harvested from manufacturer guarantee cards given to NSSF. The trade group’s contractor handed over a database of shoppers from Cabela’s, a popular sports goods retailer, to Cambridge. (An advisor to Bass Pro, which acquired Cabela in 2017, said the company was unable to find evidence that Cabela would “share customer information that is not compliant with its privacy policy before or before the acquisition.”
Cambridge documents show companies that compared the names and addresses of NSSF and Cabela data for the same names and addresses found in the vast number of consumer purchases and lifestyle information provided by data brokers.
Phase 2
Creating a Profile
Next, analysts used algorithms to obtain a psychological assessment tool called the ocean, which profiles and scores each person’s behavioral traits based on the data, measuring human openness to new experiences, conscience, extroversion, consent and neurosis. From these scores, Cambridge organized people into five groups called risk takers, caregivers, go-getters, individualists and supporters. Members of each group received Facebook ads tailored to the group’s psychological profile.
Below is the political ads and descriptions of personality groups drawn from the Cambridge papers of the NSSF Project. The ads include virtual messages along with the actual versions sent by the company for the NSSF election campaign called Gunvote.
Phase 3
Advertising
Cambridge spotted targeted people on Facebook and served ads through a platform targeted at voters in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. Each pop-up ad said it came from the NSSF Gunvote page, but was created by Cambridge. The ads were sent to potential voters in major states from June 21, 2016 to July 1, 2016, and promoted Republicans Richard Burr, Pat Tohmy, Roy Blunt, Rob Portman, Kelly Ayott and Ron Johnson.
Nearly 817,000 people saw the message, according to an internal Cambridge metrics report.
For the next three months, Cambridge included voters in Colorado, Nevada, in a multi-stage explosion of advertising and video on social media. In total, they have gained nearly 378 million views and driven the NSSF website to 60,140,280 visitors.
Cambridge also mapped the locations of people from five personality groups in major states and provided a list of NSSF contractors, including names and addresses. The contractor looked into the number and location of each persona by county. They were then designed to mail them to potential voters’ homes and convince them to vote for candidates of their preferred gun industry.
See detailed views of voters grouped by the state personas targeted by Cambridge.
