After Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) came out victorious in Iowa on Monday night, Bloomberg Politics came out with a detailed look at how his campaign made it happen. A lot of it apparently has to do with Chris Wilson, who runs Cruz's polling and analytics. His team looked at the interests of Iowa Republicans at the micro level:
For the closing days of the Iowa campaign, Cruz's campaign had defined such pools for each of his major opponents as part of what was known internally as the Oorlog Project, named by a Cruz data scientist who searched online for "war" translated into different languages and thought the Afrikaner word looked coolest. It was just the latest way that Cruz’s analytics department had tried to slice the Iowa caucus electorate in search of an advantage for its candidate. They had divided voters by faction, self-identified ideology, religious belief, personality type — creating 150 different clusters of Iowa caucus-goers — down to 60 Iowa Republicans its statistical models showed as likely to share Cruz's desire to end a state ban on fireworks sales. [Bloomberg Politics]
In fact, according to Bloomberg, Cruz had no position at all on the state's firework ban until his analysts told him he could potentially sway a few dozen voters by calling for the ban to be lifted. Read more about his campaign's questionably named analytics project here.
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