As is customary after a successful presidential campaign, the winning side has come in for a fawning feature about their unprecedented voter targeting and data gathering technology. So Donald Trump's data chief, son-in-law Jared Kushner, has received his hagiography for Forbes , which says that the Trump team used a unique targeting approach to win the election."Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration," Forbes writes. "Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface."That's nice, but it's not the real story. (We'll just set aside the fact that blocs of Americans associate hordes of undead with immigrants. Politics is an ugly business.)Praise for the campaign's voter targeting seems utterly absurd. Granted, their votes came very cheap: Reuters notes that they paid only $5 in spending per vote, against nearly twice that for Hillary Clinton. But the Trump campaign benefited from an unprecedented and baffling 11th-hour intervention by FBI Director James Comey , a steady drip of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign that created an image of wrongdoing, rafts of fake news using the low-information segment of the electorate to drive traffic and profit, and networks like CNN employing a surrogate like Corey Lewandowski for months. He was still on the Trump campaign payroll , and under a non-disclosure agreement at the time.Anecdotally even, there were times when I was flooded with pro-Trump advertising. Often, that would be on Twitter (where I followed Clinton and not Trump), Facebook (where I am geotagged in a heavily Clinton district), and on political sites like Talking Points Memo (which criticized Trump nearly daily, and continues to do so.) Don't just take my word for it.