This year's 'October surprise' may be no surprise at all

This presidential cycle has challenged the rules and precedents of our political system so often that it’s no surprise it’s posing a challenge for the “October surprise.”

As the month of October goes on, media usage of the phrase only escalates. Yet nothing seems yet to fill the bill.

Now well into its fifth decade, that familiar phrase has become such a staple of punditry as to suggest it has standing on the official calendar.

But of course there is nothing official about the October surprise. It exists in the mind of the beholder. And there’s usually room for debate about how much any unusual event late in the campaign really matters to the outcome.

Suffice it to say, the phrase is used far more often than it is justified.

The phrase has long suggested an event or development emerging unexpectedly in the closing weeks of the campaign to upend the contest, flip the script or at least reverse the momentum of the race.

But even if nothing takes place that really matches the description, the phrase gets a workout every four years. Campaigns are always looking for new ways to gain advantage or to cry foul — and we in the media are hungry for new twists or different ways to dramatize the contest.

Thus we have lately heard “October surprise” applied to a judge’s order unsealing  evidence in the January 6, 2021 insurrection case against former President Donald Trump.

We have heard the label thrown at the short-lived dock workers’ strike and the uptick in oil prices. It's even been bandied about in critiques of the new book War by investigative reporter Bob Woodward, which says Trump sent precious COVID-19 testing equipment to Russian leader Vladimir Putin at the height of the pandemic — even as many Americans were unable to procure their own.

Surely each of these stories has had meaning and effect. But it’s hard to say any has been a game changer, especially when the polls seem frozen in place. The last time we saw the race truly change was when President Biden pulled out and the Democratic nomination was shifted to Vice President Harris.

This month has been unusually heavy with news of war in the Middle East and Hurricanes Helene and Milton devastating swaths of the Southeast. And there has been no shortage of stories and shifting narratives in the presidential race, accompanied each day by a fresh crop of polls from swing states.

But several of these have been part of a larger process — such as the legal system or the hurricane season — with its own rhythms and timetables. So none so far has had the true element of surprise that would seem necessary for an actual October surprise.

Nonetheless, campaigns regularly fling the phrase as an accusation, adding at least a whiff of skullduggery. This air of suspicion attaches most often to the incumbent party in the White House, which is presumed to be able to deploy government agencies and other powerful forces for partisan purposes.

Origin in the race of 1980

That implication dates back to what appears to be the phrase’s origin in the campaign of 1980. Republican nominee Ronald Reagan’s campaign chief, William Casey, had been warning the media (and the voters) for months to watch out for a sudden development — an “October surprise” — that might resolve the Iran hostage crisis just before Election Day.

Casey was anticipating a sudden release of the more than 50 hostages who had been imprisoned inside the U.S. Embassy for a year after the Islamist revolution of 1979. Many Republicans feared the months-long negotiations to gain the hostages’ release would suddenly bear fruit just before Election Day. If that were to happen, they reasoned, a grateful nation might look at incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter with new appreciation.

Had that happened, it is not hard to imagine the media frenzy that would have followed. Americans who were alive at the time can easily recall the upwelling of relief and joy that greeted the hostages when Iran did finally free them on the day Carter left office and Reagan’s presidency began.

The fear and the phrase persist

Ever since that fateful fall, the memory of the October surprise that did not happen in 1980 has been revived — at least as a prompt for speculation and a goad to disagreement.

Presidential campaigns and the media who follow them have searched in each cycle for something that would really fulfill the fears of one campaign and give fresh hope to the other.

We have seen presidential contests take a notable turn in the final weeks of the campaign, and at least as often we have heard potentially meaningful events described as an October surprise.

In 1992, incumbent President George H.W. Bush was staging something of a comeback in the fall against the upstart Democratic nominee, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. Then former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was indicted for his role years earlier in what had been called the Iran-Contra scandal. The case involved the sale of arms to Iran in exchange for Iran’s assistance in winning the release of a different set of hostages during Reagan’s White House tenure. It brought back the worst memories of Bush’s years as Reagan’s vice president and blunted his late drive.

Something similar occurred in 2000 when George W. Bush was running for president against Democratic nominee Al Gore. Just five days before Election Day it was revealed that the younger Bush had a previously undisclosed drunk driving arrest on the books. Gore won the popular vote that fall, but Bush managed to eke out a historically narrow win in the Electoral College. Bush’s campaign manager, Karl Rove, insisted thereafter that Bush had suffered from low turnout among evangelical voters troubled by the drunk driving story.

In 2008, the presidential race between Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and Arizona Sen. John McCain of Arizona was too close to call in early September. Then the landmark investment bank Lehman Brothers went under in mid-September and precipitated a Wall Street panic unlike any since 1929. The signs of the meltdown over mortgage-backed securities had been flashing red for a year, but in the election context the financial crisis was truly an October surprise and a crucial factor in Obama’s historic win.

Four years later, Republican nominee Mitt Romney was bruised when caught on tape referring to “47 percent” of the voters as “dependent” on government programs. While that story broke in late September it was still reverberating for weeks thereafter, weakening Romney in the home stretch.

Did an October story make the difference?

While late-breaking stories may well tip the scales for some voters, their actual effect can be difficult to measure. It is not uncommon for some political actors and media to call a late-breaking story an October surprise when there is little evidence that it mattered that much.

One such occasion was the 2016 contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In early October much of the nation was shocked to hear the bawdy way Trump spoke of women while preparing to tape a 2005 episode of the TV show Access Hollywood. Major figures in the party such as national chairman Reince Priebus denounced the remarks and privately told Trump he would lose in a landslide.

But Trump seemed unperturbed. First Lady Melania Trump gave interviews agreeing with her husband’s dismissal of it all as “locker room talk” and conservative media generally fell in line. While the release of the tape probably cost him some votes, he still managed to win the Electoral College.

In the same month, however, a different release had quite a different effect. James Comey, the FBI director, told the chairman of a congressional committee that a new file of Hillary Clinton’s private emails had been found during the course of an unrelated investigation. Her emails, long a source of controversy as they involved some official business from her time as Secretary of State, were suddenly back in the news in a big way. By the time Comey announced that no new evidence was found in the emails, the focus and momentum of the campaign had shifted. Clinton would win the popular vote, but fall short in the Electoral College due to narrow losses in several swing states.

Just as ambiguous was the 2020 impact of Trump’s personal bout with COVID-19. Did it hurt him or help that he went to the hospital in October with a serious case of a disease he had all but dismissed earlier in his re-election year? Was there a sympathy vote or a rally-round effect when he returned to the White House and dramatically removed his hospital mask?

The campaign of 2024 marks its own trail

This year, there may just be too much happening for one story to be as pivotal as the October surprise is supposed to be.

We have two wars happening in Ukraine and the Middle East. The U.S. is heavily involved and is a major supplier of arms to one side in each of these wars. We have had a historic hurricane season that has spread death and destruction far beyond the coastline communities that prepare for such storms. We have new peaks of tech achievement through artificial intelligence and historic levels of income disparity that recall the “Gilded Age” of the late 1800s.

And we have had a campaign season in which a former president has returned to be nominated again for the first time since 1892. We also have an incumbent president who has chosen not to seek another term for the first time in almost 60 years. And a major party has not only nominated a woman — but a woman of color whose parents were immigrants.

All these powerful storylines have already contributed to an election unlike any other. So perhaps the notion of one late story breaking through and turning the race on its head is itself an anachronism at this point. As greater numbers of voters choose to vote early, especially by mail, the significance of any and all October events is decreased.

It is possible too that the original concept of a blockbuster revelation late in the campaign will be another victim of our age of distrust in the media. Where there were once three dominant TV news sources, we now have countless sources of video and audio with widely disparate points of view and approaches to the news itself. Extreme partisanship and the deceptive powers of AI have made it more difficult for any particular piece of information to be accepted by the electorate as a whole.

Nonetheless, the notion of a transforming turn of events in the eleventh hour remains powerful in the imagination. And like a Halloween hobgoblin it will hover over us at least until October 31.