Perhaps the easier explanation is not "dumb" but that MAGA crowd is just older and thus richer so better monetizable by definition.
Also, because different groups of people are different by net worth and IQ, we will start (unknowingly) selecting them for either dumb, rich, or both.
Hence the myth that "Americans are dumb" - they of course aren't, it's just that in almost every other country people rich enough to make enough money off them are the elite and thus too smart to profit off them, and only in America, because the country is rich, even dumb people frequently have cash worth bothering. Germans may not be any smarter than Americans, but poorer - thus appear smarter as a group.
(before someone asks what the left equivalent is, bluesky has a plague of accounts claiming to be Palestinian refugees and asking for money)
> He turned to Google’s Gemini AI for advice and decided to create a “hot girl” crafted specifically for the “MAGA/conservative niche,” after the software told him that “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal,” according to Wired.
<proceeds to believe everything 'printed' on the internet>
If these folks really did change to be more susceptible to scams though, I hope for my own sake that this is less a function of aging and more a function of being fed a steady diet of conservative propaganda. I can avoid the latter...
It doesn’t explain why so many more fall for it.
It's pretty easy: he started out trying to create a "hot girl" influencer, then refined that. It could be his starting point was biased towards filling a certain type of conservative fantasy, but wasn't as easily adaptable to progressives. For instance: it could be that lonely straight progressive men are more neurotic about their sexuality, and thus less-likely to respond positively to a bikini model picture, even if the "model" is flattering their political ideology.
Also there's been a demographic divergence, and young women are much more liberal than men, which means there's less of a supply of "hot girl" conservatives and more unfulfilled demand for them.
I suspect the progressive version of this is something a lot less discoverable by a random slop-making foreign man.
That's not the kind of fantasy I'm talking about. I'm talking about the kind of fantasy person that could cause a progressive to feel some pull towards a para-social relationship. That kind of thing was obviously at play with this character. I don't think you're going to get that from a politician.