Michelle Goldberg: I don’t want to let myself off quite that easy — I don’t think being too informed was the problem. But I definitely think people who went to Maine, and people who lived there, were affected by seeing the incredible energy around Platner. When I traveled to Maine last October, right after the first round of scandals broke, I was pretty skeptical — up to the last minute, I was emailing my editor wondering if I should cancel the trip because I thought he was probably cooked. Then I got there and saw the effect he was having on these huge crowds, and it made me think he had something special.

What should have been more obvious is that charisma and intelligence can easily coexist with very dark personal qualities. I still don’t think Platner had any Nazi inclinations; if he did, they would have shown up in his thousands of anonymous Reddit posts. But his extremely dismissive attitude about sexual assault was right there, a waving red flag signaling how this would all end.

Alex Seitz-Wald: The reality was that the enthusiasm for Platner was real, organic and pervasive in Maine. He did something basically unprecedented in modern politics — going from absolute unknown (no elected office, no celebrity, no big business) to steamrolling a two-term sitting governor. Yes, he had help from savvy national political operators and online voices with big platforms, but on the ground in Maine, I saw extremely offline friends, family members and acquaintances fall hard for him. Just weeks into his campaign, there were hundreds of people at our local pizza place in Rockport, where my daughter just had her sixth birthday party, and everyone I spoke to left tremendously impressed. Among grass-roots Democrats here, at least, there was a real desire for an “authentic” outsider (even if we now know he was not who he claimed to be), and I don’t think we can blame his voters for being taken for a ride.

Yglesias: I’ve also been struck across several trips to Maine by the genuine enthusiasm for Platner, at least among folks in Hancock County, where I am at the moment and where Platner is from. One thing I’m wondering is, how much has Trump — or the shifting media environment — changed what Democrats look for in a candidate?

Goldberg: People’s willingness to overlook the first round of scandals — the Reddit posts and Totenkopf tattoo — definitely came from a sense that the rules of politics had changed, and that Democrats had been, if anything, too fastidious in choosing their candidates. And his anger matched the anger of the electorate. Trump’s re-election radicalized a lot of Democrats, so that someone who’d posted online about arming themselves to fight fascism no longer seemed so unreasonable.