Stay informed with FP’s news and analysis as the United States prepares to vote.
In the United States, October surprises are as old as elections. For over two centuries, candidates have waited with bated breath in the month before the presidential election to see if any big event breaks that fundamentally changes the dynamics of the competition. In most cases, the fears of an October surprise have outweighed the times they actually happen. But this rarely stops campaigns from worrying in the final stretch.
This month, big things are already happening that have unsettled the presidential race. The war in the Middle East has intensified as Israel is now engaged in combat with Lebanon and Iran, as well as the continued war in Gaza. And U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed key parts of special counsel Jack Smith’s report, as well, providing more damning details about former U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Further earth-shattering developments in the rest of October will provide another huge stress test to the perception that nothing can really change the fundamental dynamics of elections in the United States’ deeply polarized and calcified 50-50 electorate. And, in turn, October surprises raise and shed light on the persuasiveness of two competing theories about how presidential elections work in the United States.
One of the first October surprises happened in 1840, when prosecutors revealed that they would charge prominent officials from the Whig Party with election fraud. Yet the surprise didn’t end up hurting the Whig candidate, William Harrison, who defeated Democrat Martin Van Buren. In 1880, the New York-based Truth newspaper published the text of what it claimed to be a letter from Republican James Garfield to someone named H.L. Morey of Massachusetts, in which he dismissed the “Chinese problem,” whereby foreign workers were thought to be taking jobs from people who were already in the United States. Employers, Garfield allegedly wrote, should be able to “buy labor where they can get it the cheapest.” Although the letter was a forgery, some observers speculated that its publication, and wide circulation by Democrats thereafter, hurt Garfield in California, where worker hostility toward Chinese immigrants was strong. Garfield still won the election, though Democrats won in California.
Four years later, on Oct. 29, a minister named Samuel Burchard railed against Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion”—a reference to alcohol, Catholicism, and secession. Democrats responded by charging that their opponents were anti-Catholic, a claim that stung in New York. Republican James Blaine, who failed to respond to the claim until Nov. 1, lost the election to Grover Cleveland, who did well with Irish Catholic voters.
On Oct. 7, 1964, one of President Lyndon Johnson’s top aides and close confidante, Walter Jenkins, was arrested and charged for “disorderly conduct” with a man at a YMCA in Washington, D.C. The YMCA was a known site for homosexual encounters that the FBI had under surveillance. When Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was first asked about the incident by reporters, he responded, off-the-record, “What a way to win an election. Communists and cocksuckers.” Johnson went into full-scale damage control, separating himself from his married friend Jenkins—to Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird’s chagrin—characterizing Jenkins as having a nervous breakdown and working with the press to contain the scandal. In the end, the surprise fizzled. World events, including Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev falling from power, overwhelmed national news. Ultimately, Goldwater decided not to make an issue of Jenkins, whom he knew well from the Senate and the Air Force Reserve.
The notion of the October surprise as a deliberate campaign strategy gained traction in 1968. Republicans were convinced that Johnson planned to announce a breakthrough in the war with Vietnam in October to boost the chances of Vice President Hubert Humphrey defeating Richard Nixon. Vietnam was the election race’s defining issue, a military quagmire that had deeply divided the Democratic Party and torn the nation apart. Should the Democrats announce some kind of breakthrough, Nixon’s team believed, Humphrey could win. On Oct. 31, Republicans’ fears came true when Johnson announced that there would be a temporary halt to the bombing in North Vietnam. It was then that people connected to the Nixon campaign secretly reached out to the South Vietnamese through third parties to subvert any successful peace negotiations in early November—and then Nixon won.
Although Americans didn’t know that any of this was happening, Johnson did. He even confronted Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, telling his friend, “This is treason”—though Johnson decided not to go public with the matter for fear of undermining Nixon if he won and exposing the wiretapping program that was the basis of his evidence. Instead, Johnson left it to historians to uncover in the archives. When running for reelection in 1972, Nixon’s administration was the source of a surprise when the North Vietnamese agreed on Oct. 8 to a peace deal and Henry Kissinger, who was national security advisor at the time, announced that “peace is at hand” 18 days later, despite knowing the deal had broken apart by then.
In 1980, Republicans were again convinced that the Democrats were up to no good. It was in this context that William Casey—a lawyer and Republican ally of Ronald Reagan who co-founded the Manhattan Institute in 1978—coined the term “October surprise” as he warned fellow conservatives that President Jimmy Carter would announce a deal with Iranians to release the American hostages being held captive. According to Max Boot’s new biography, Reagan, Reagan’s inner circle of advisors was extremely worried that this would cost him the election. So much so, Boot wrote, that the campaign spoke about the possibility of an October surprise to make it difficult for Carter to move forward without looking political. The Reagan campaign even prepared for a massive ad blitz on this issue should a release take place. Carter completed a deal for the hostages’ release, but the Iranians refused to let the hostages go until the day when Reagan was inaugurated as the commander in chief. Several writers would later claim that Casey and others worked to prevent any resolution before the election. The evidence that they had done so, Boot wrote, is “substantial and credible if still circumstantial.”
October surprises kept happening, not least because the news didn’t stop just because there was one month left until an election. In 2000, news broke that Republican candidate George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving in 1976. In 2012, President Barack Obama appeared in a photo-op with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, in the aftermath of the devasting Hurricane Sandy. Republicans feared that the joint appearance boosted Obama’s standing against Republican Mitt Romney. With 11 days until the 2016 election, FBI Director James Comey sent a message to Congress revealing that the FBI was reopening its investigation into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails based on newly discovered material. Some credited the decision to reinvigorating Donald Trump’s allegations about “Crooked Hillary” in the final days of the election. (On Nov. 6, Comey announced that the case was closed.) Trump survived a surprise that October with the release of the Access Hollywood tapes.
The history of October surprises has always raised the question of whether they matter—and with it, two theories as to how elections actually proceed. The game change theory, made famous by classic journalistic accounts ranging from Theodore White’s classic works in the 1960s to Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s account of the 2020 election, posits that elections are filled with dramatic turning points and defined by moments where the direction of a race moves drastically, and unexpectedly, in one way or the other. The idea of an October surprise fits comfortably in this kind of analysis since it constitutes the kind of unpredictable event that can suddenly transform the dynamics of an election.
The structure theory, advanced by political scientists such as John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, as well as journalists like Ronald Brownstein, takes a step back to argue that the direction of elections is more predictable than day-to-day accounts imply, especially in our age of intense electoral polarization. Focusing on big-picture dynamics, such as the lack of voting shifts in most states, structuralists are not convinced that critical junctures are so disruptive.
Looking back on history at many of the most famous cases, the breaking news of an October surprise didn’t change the outcome. Kissinger announcing that “peace is at hand” in late October 1972 was not the main factor behind Nixon’s landslide victory against Sen. George McGovern. The candidate who was placed at greatest risk because of an event or revelation, such as Bush in 2000, still won. Retrospective analyses have shown how the direction of the race had been set before the surprise happened, so we overplay how significant this phenomenon can be. Indeed, it continues to be difficult to point to a single example that produced the final outcome. Though polls show that Comey’s 2016 letter hurt Clinton by renewing conversations about alleged corruption, many other factors were at work, ranging from the failure of her campaign to adequately poll in key states during the final weeks of the race to Clinton’s own difficultly devising an effective strategy to counteract Trumpian chaos.
Yet because of the unusual nature of this year’s campaign, with a new candidate at the top of one ticket and the shortened campaign schedule, it is possible that this could be the year an October surprise derails proceedings. Moreover, given that elections are now won on the margins by slivers of voters within a handful of swing states, the news might move narrow segments of the electorate that matter. Early voting is underway in several states, so everything has the potential to sway voters in real time.
Even after all the instability of the past few months, though, what is remarkable is that the election is now exactly where pollsters predicted it to be—evenly divided in most of the key swing states. In many respects, President Joe Biden and his polling numbers earlier this year were the anomaly. Problems with his campaign, as well as his age, dragged Democrats’ enthusiasm far below where it has been. Now things are back to the normal we have been living through since the 1990s, where nothing—not an attempted assassination or decisive debate performance—dramatically moves the needle. A similar phenomenon can be observed with nonelection events, like how not even the COVID-19 pandemic and the botched responses of government officials to it made much of a dent in the electoral map.
Should more traumatic events happen between now and Halloween, it is possible that after a few hours of frenzied news coverage, the red-blue wall would probably still be standing. It has survived a last-minute change in candidates, two attempted assassinations on the Republican nominee, two dramatic conventions, and the conflict in the Middle East. So, if something just as dramatic happens again, the odds are the nation will still find itself in default position.