Long Before Cambridge Analytica And Facebook, Simulmatics Linked Data And Politics

It's a big election year, and one party's candidate is the successor to a popular two-term president. A little-known company offers the other party, which is in disarray, technology that uses vast amounts of data to profile voters. The election is incredibly close -- and the longshot candidate wins. This was 1960, not 2016, and the winning ticket was John F. Kennedy, not Donald Trump. The little-known -- and now nearly entirely forgotten -- company was called Simulmatics, the subject of Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore's timely new book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.