What Could Be the October Surprise in a Political Season of Surprises?

The news alert came through around 4 p.m. on the first Friday of October 2016 — one month before the presidential election. The Washington Post was in possession of an unaired video showing Donald Trump bragging in extremely lewd terms about kissing and groping women. The story of what became known as the “Access Hollywood tape” was a quintessential October Surprise, but it wasn’t the only one that emerged that month, or even that day.

Hours before the Access Hollywood story broke, Wikileaks began a two-month campaign of releasing a slow drip of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Those emails included recordings of speeches Clinton gave to Wall Street banks for high fees, the revelation that a debate question was leaked to her in advance by a CNN commentator and a contradictory stance on trade deals from the one she promoted on the campaign trail.

Clinton would go on to lose that election by a hair, while Trump would win — in spite of the revelations made public on the 7th, and with the help of an even bigger October Surprise that came weeks later, in the final days of the campaign: a letter that then-FBI Director James Comey sent to Congress informing lawmakers his agency had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server Clinton used as secretary of state. Clinton, and many Democrats, say that letter is single-handedly responsible for costing her the 2016 election.

For decades, presidential campaigns and their political operatives have watched for an October Surprise, a major, narrative-changing piece of news that could upend the race in its final leg. History has shown that candidates have been right to anticipate a late game changer, but in an election cycle that has brought nothing but surprises, what is left to drastically alter the contest between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris?

Up until June, it seemed like the 2024 election was political deja vu. The rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden was dull. Both suffered from underwater approval ratings. They were stalling in the polls. Neither seemed to enthuse voters, who regularly told pollsters they would prefer someone — anyone — different from the two elderly men running for their second White House terms.

That all changed on June 27, when Trump and Biden stepped on stage in Atlanta for the earliest presidential debate in modern history. The next 90 minutes would end the half-century political career of the 81-year-old Democratic incumbent. Biden’s disastrous performance led to harsh criticisms from his own party about his ability to serve a second term. Still, he refused to step aside, insisting he was the only one who could defeat Trump.

Just over two weeks later, his Republican opponent would survive an assassination attempt when a bullet grazed his ear at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Instantly iconic images of a bloody and defiant Trump, fist raised, would rocket around the world, leading even many Democrats to acknowledge that the dynamic of the race just changed — and not in their favor.

But then, a week later, after Republicans formally nominated their still-bandaged candidate, Biden would change the dynamic yet again, withdrawing from the race and immediately endorsing Harris for the Democratic nomination, a switch up without precedent in modern politics. A month later, Harris — having injected new life into her party — was officially nominated in Chicago. Three-and-a-half weeks later, there would be another thwarted attempt on Trump’s life.

The string of surprises has left many wondering what could be in store for the final days of the 2024 election season. Could developments in foreign wars, like a ceasefire in Gaza or a military victory for Ukraine, boost Harris’ chances? Likewise, would a full-fledged Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon — looking increasingly likely by the day — help Trump? Are there still damning personal revelations about either of the candidates or their running mates that haven’t yet been brought to light? And then there’s the economy, which appears to be firing on all cylinders even as signs of a softening labor market and consumer confidence keep concerns about an impending recession alive.

Michael DuHaime, the architect of Chris Christie’s first successful New Jersey gubernatorial campaign, told Newsweek that because both candidates have been longtime public figures and have been vetted by both the press and their opponents for years, he doesn’t anticipate a potential October Surprise to be personal in nature.

“The real surprise will be not about them, but an issue perhaps they have yet to prepare for,” DuHaime said.

A former senior adviser to President George W. Bush and the late Senator John McCain, DuHaime said that with so much happening both abroad and at home, the impacts of any October Surprises will lie in whether the Biden administration is blamed for (hurting Harris as a result) and more importantly, in how each candidate reacts and “who looks calm, strong and in charge during a crisis.”

“Campaigns all like to think they are prepared for the unexpected, but the best you can really do is be cool in a crisis and respond in a level-headed way,” DuHaime, who also served as the political director for the Republican National Committee, said.

DuHaime learned that the hard way. On Wednesday, September 24, 2008, as the collapse of Lehman Brothers was triggering a global financial meltdown, his candidate famously decided to “suspend” his campaign to attend to the gathering economic catastrophe. As McCain took himself off the trail and said he would not attend the upcoming debate, challenging Obama to do the same, the Democratic nominee pounced.

“This is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible for dealing with this mess,” Obama said. McCain abruptly canceled an appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman that day to return to Washington—except he didn’t.

In a brutal moment for the Republican, Letterman, during the taping of his show that evening, repeatedly cut to the live feed from CBS Evening News, happening a few blocks away, showing McCain preparing for an interview with Katie Couric. The televised moment cemented the growing public view that McCain’s campaign was flailing, while Obama appeared to be a steady hand at the till.

Of course, Republicans have not been the only victims of an October Surprise (or in McCain’s case, one that came a bit early, in late September).

Seasoned political consultant and former Democratic speechwriter Robert Shrum served as a senior adviser to both John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and Al Gore’s 2000 run. Shrum was with Kerry on October 29, 2004, four days before the election, when Al Jazeera broadcast excerpts of a video from Osama bin Laden in which the al Qaeda leader took responsibility for 9/11 and slammed Kerry’s opponent, George W. Bush.

Now with two decades of hindsight, Shrum believes that bin Laden was the deciding factor in handing the 2004 election to Bush. In addition to knocking the increasingly bad news from the Iraq War off the front pages in the final days of the race, bin Laden reminded voters about the terror threat the U.S. still faced three years after the 9/11 attacks — a threat that Bush was seen as better at handling. The former president himself thought as much, saying later:

“I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”

As Shrum recounted to Newsweek about that October Surprise: “The campaign has started moving toward focusing on domestic issues like prescription drug prices and Social Security, Medicare, the environment, and suddenly we were back to the only campaign that Bush wanted to run, which was on 9/11 and basically with him making the argument, ‘I am your protector.'”

As for this election, Shrum said that Trump’s off-the-cuff campaign strategy and Harris’ steadfast message discipline makes it even harder to predict how a possible surprise could impact the vote.

A 2024 October Surprise also has the chance of being more impactful for Harris than Trump, a known quantity if ever there was one, according to strategist Scott Jennings, who worked on both of Bush’s campaigns.

“It is going to be hard to ‘surprise’ the electorate in October about Trump. What else do you want? He’s been indicted and convicted. He’s nearly been assassinated… twice. He was president and survived two impeachments. I mean what else can you do to the guy?” Jennings told Newsweek.

“Harris is a little different because she’s less defined. But the most likely ‘surprise’ would be for a national or international emergency to happen that further jaundiced the public’s view of [the Biden] administration.”

For Rachel Bitecofer, the election-forecaster-turned-political strategist who correctly predicted the “blue wave” in the 2018 midterms and then Biden’s 2020 win, this year’s October Surprise has come and gone.

“It happened in July,” Bitecofer told Newsweek. “There’s nothing that I can imagine that would shake this cycle from where it’s going to be and where I anticipated it would be eight weeks ago when the switch [from Biden to Harris] happened.”

For months, Trump had the advantage…that has inverted and has been a steady Harris advantage ever since the switch,” she said. “The stasis that we’re in now—toss-up, advantage Harris—is where we can expect to stay. It’s possible we’ll see World War III break out in a month, but I doubt it.”

Matt Bennett, a veteran Democratic strategist who worked on both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns, said that given the steadiness of the polls since Harris replaced Biden, neither camp is expecting a major shake-up, “even if there’s a significant event.”

“Neither Harris nor Trump will get credit or blame for major geopolitical changes, and most voters are not focused on those at all,” Bennett said. “Where October Surprises have mattered—the [1979-80] Iranian hostage crisis, Wall Street collapses, etc., they’ve had a real impact on Americans in tangible ways.”

Coined by Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager William Casey, the term “October Surprise” was popularized after Casey suggested to the press that incumbent Jimmy Carter would announce a last-minute hostage deal with Iran to benefit his reelection.

That feared October Surprise, which failed to materialize, was one of the main reasons that Carter lost the 1980 presidential election. (The 52 American hostages in Iran would ultimately be freed minutes after Reagan’s inauguration, sparking conspiracy theories that the Reagan campaign had convinced the Iranian government to delay the release until after the election. In fact, it came out years later that there were efforts within the top echelons of the Reagan campaign to ensure the hostages were not released until after Election Day.)

And yet, the term has stuck with voters and the phenomenon has come to fruition, in one form or another, in the last seven presidential elections.

Last cycle, in the early morning hours of October 2, 2020, Trump announced he and First Lady Melania Trump tested positive for COVID-19 as part of an apparent superspreader event that began at the fast-tracked Rose Garden ceremony to nominate Amy Coney Barrett as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s successor on the Supreme Court. Though Ginsberg’s death in late September could itself have been seen as an early October Surprise in that chaotic election season.

Trump’s bout with COVID became so severe that it led to his hospitalization at Walter Reed Medical Center, throwing the nation’s leadership into uncertainty and further highlighted the ongoing crisis posed by a pandemic that had, at that point, killed more than 200,000 Americans.

Less than two weeks later, the New York Post published the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story, which claimed that a hard drive belonging to Joe Biden’s son showed emails that alleged corruption by the Democratic nominee. Over concerns the material came from a foreign hacking campaign—it did not—Facebook and Twitter suppressed the Post story, leading to outrage among Republicans who saw it as evidence that the media and Big Tech were biased in favor of Biden.

In 2016, there was the Access Hollywood tape, followed by the Wikileaks hack and the Comey letter, to make for a trio of Surprises.

In 2012, some viewed Hurricane Sandy, and incumbent Barack Obama’s response to the disaster, as that year’s October Surprise. When the impact of that storm became apparent, Obama deftly canceled his campaign events to travel to the inundated Northeast. Romney eventually followed suit and suspended his campaign after initially rescheduling events to take him away from the storm path.

The images from the storm, including one of Chris Christie embracing Obama on the tarmac, helped to bury headlines about the administration’s bungled handling of the terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which killed four Americans and at the time threatened Obama’s reelection.

Others, meanwhile, thought a different October Surprise cost Romney—already cast as an out-of-touch elitist by Democrats—the election: a leaked video of Romney lamenting to donors that 47 percent of Americans did not “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

In 2008, there was the above-mentioned economic collapse that helped deliver a victory for Obama. And four years earlier, the bin Laden tape helped cement a close race for Bush.

The list goes on. In 2000, days before the November election, a Democratic lawyer from Maine confirmed that Bush had been arrested for drunk driving in 1976.

In 1992, the former defense secretary under Bush’s father was indicted for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Bush Sr., already behind in the polls, never recovered.

“The ‘October Surprise’ has long been a fixture in American political campaigns,” James Haggerty, one of the nation’s top crisis communications experts, told Newsweek. “But I suspect in this current fractured media environment, you’re more likely to see an ‘October Spaghetti on the Wall’ approach—throw it out there and see what sticks.”

“Mostly these will be personal, trying to convince voters just how evil their opponent is: Harris is an American-hating Communist, Trump is a racist fascist and on and on and on,” Haggerty said. “As to global events—a Mideast ceasefire or expanding war, a major victory by Russia—these may factor in, but they are a lot harder to predict, and with each it is less clear just who would benefit.”

Faiz Shakir, the former campaign manager for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, also pointed out that, in the era of early voting, October Surprises are less impactful since so many voters have already begun casting their ballots.

“Both campaigns are going to know and understand that large chunks of voters are already in,” Shakir told Newsweek. “In the last final stages, what they’ll be worried about is who hasn’t voted.”

“Ultimately, knowing what an October Surprise will be is unpredictable,” Denny Salas, political strategist and vice president of lobbying and communications firm Gotham Government Relations, said. “But by knowing the issues on the top of voter’s minds, the key constituents at play, you can guess what type of story could have a damaging impact in this race.”

The impact or non-impact of an October Surprise is also dependent on which voting bloc it appeals to. When the news about the Access Hollywood tape broke in 2016, Clinton supporters rejoiced, believing there was no way the contest would be close after such a damning development that was expected to lead suburban and white female voters to rebuke Trump en masse.

Trump’s running mate Mike Pence even released his own statement saying he was “offended by the words and actions” used by Trump in the tape. Trump’s approval numbers dropped in the aftermath of the tape’s release, with national polls showing Clinton leading by double digits.

And still, against all odds, Trump won the 2016 election — and he did it with 52 percent support of white women, according to exit polls.

That’s the thing with October Surprises: As shocking as they may be, they don’t always affect the outcome of the vote.

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