They aren't just scumbags they are snake oil salesmen. No one in the political world thinks of them as anything but snake oil salesmen. Their company is about tricking people into buying their service and never delivering any results. Look at their track record. A lot of people will point to them and say "see, this is how Trump won the election" but that's just not even remotely close to the truth, and honestly just melds their marketing of snake oil with their shadiness. Many political people have paid them and subsequently dropped them because they didn't deliver. This was no different.
The abuse of Facebook's API/Graph is much less of a story about a secret genius agency (far from the truth) and more about how Facebook policies are lax on privacy of users. Facebook knew about this for a while, and sat on it. Facebook also acknowledge it was not a "breach" it was just exploiting things Facebook had already allowed through their shifting privacy policies and permissions.
Yes, you've put your finger on the core of it - the way Facebook compromises privacy. It's about informed consent on sharing data - we need companies to get informed consent.
Trump didn't win by a slim margin at all, he lost the popular vote, but only largely because of California. He had early calls in several states that Hillary was supposed to win. Hillary lost states she never stepped foot in, she was just not a strong candidate, she didn't campaign, she had little ground game and conceded states simply because they were a "firewall." Trump should have never been within spitting distance of any Democratic candidate, especially after Obama who was fairly popular among moderates.
Trump may have won on a slim margin, but he was supposed to lose on a huge one, by most predictions. If CA merely granted a net positive, then it likely paled in comparison to whatever else substantially affected results.
The abuse of Facebook's API/Graph is much less of a story about a secret genius agency (far from the truth) and more about how Facebook policies are lax on privacy of users. Facebook knew about this for a while, and sat on it. Facebook also acknowledge it was not a "breach" it was just exploiting things Facebook had already allowed through their shifting privacy policies and permissions.