Congressman George Santos Charged with Fraud, Money Laundering and More

The district has always been pretty right-wing. It sent a very strong right-winger in Pete King for 20 years. The incumbent Democrat left to run for governor, so he was running against a relative unknown. His win was a bit of a surprise, but not an enormous one.

Basically, he "fooled" everybody in that nobody was really paying all that much attention. A fair number of people in both parties were suspicious, but Democrats claiming he was shady just sounds like partisanship, and Republicans weren't going to call attention to it. (The time for that would have been in the primaries, and nobody else really wanted to contest that district.) In the end, the vast majority of voters went along party lines, and it being a midterm election, an enormous number just stayed home.

The district has almost 800,000 people in it. If the House of Representatives was ever supposed to involve a personal relationship with constituents, that time has long since passed. So the kind of vetting you might expect has been replaced by mass media, where even innocuous candidates are swamped with negative campaigning, and so voters tend to ignore it.