Is the "October Surprise" a myth?

Politics & Elections
1

This is a phrase that has come up a lot in the Graham Platner thread, and it also got thrown around a lot during the Bernie Wars of 2016. People attack a primary candidate they don’t like by insisting that, even if they have no obvious scandals now, if they are nominated the Kremlin-Funded GOP Hate Machine ™ will crank up and find some nefarious secret about the candidate which they will release at the last minute for maximum impact.

As far as I can see, though, this is a thing that LITERALLY NEVER HAPPENS.

Defining our terms: An “October Surprise” would be a campaign deliberately choosing to withhold damaging information about an opponent until an electorally critical moment, OR an incumbent politician choosing to delay taking some popular action until close to election time. The second case is where the phrase actually comes from; it originated from Republicans concerned that Jimmy Carter might have struck a deal to get the hostages back from Iran and was just waiting until October to finalize it.

The closest thing I can think of in a major American election would be the Access Hollywood tape coming out in October 2016. There have at least been some claims made that NBC sat on that story until close to election time in order to harm Trump, but no claims that they did so in coordination with the Clinton campaign, so that wouldn’t qualify. The Comey letter was certainly an unpleasant surprise, but it seems unlikely that Comey’s primary purpose in releasing it at that time was actually to harm Clinton. Maybe the drunk driving revelations that came out about GW Bush in 2004; the Kerry campaign denounced that invasion of Bush’s privacy and didn’t explicitly make an issue of it. They could have been lying, but I’m not aware of any evidence to that effect.

I also wouldn’t count the many cases where campaigns got desperate and just made shit up at the last minute. That’s not the same as having real shit and waiting for a strategic moment to deploy it.

If you DO have real dirt on your opponent, you probably don’t want to wait until the last minute, because voters will justifiably be suspicious of accusations released too late to give the accused a chance to defend themselves. If you have something actually damaging, you want to get it out there and make it the focus of the campaign.

Likewise, if you’re able to free hostages or whatnot and you just choose to let them sit there a while longer for your political purposes, that’s going to be absolutely devastating if you get caught. Better to just take the accolades, even if the timing isn’t ideal.

Can anyone think of any good examples of this happening in real life?

2

It’s probably less of a thing, now that early voting is so common in so many states. If you are going to drop a surprise, you don’t want to do it after some folks have already locked in their votes.

3

Yeah, I can’t recall a single October surprise actually happening. I do recall in late 2004, though, a lot of people claiming Bush was going to have bin Laden killed in October to get a boost for the election.

4

which is why Reagan went behind the scenes to subvert it

5

If it wasn’t intended to harm Clinton, why did he do it? It violated policy to release new information that close to an election. I think its purpose was to destroy Clinton and it succeeded. We are all, including Comey, paying the price for that. May he rot in hell.

6

I think he probably expected Clinton to win and wanted to demonstrate his political independence from the incoming Administration. But in any case, that still wouldn’t fit the definition unless Comey was actually coordinating his timing with Trump campaign officials.

7

Which is an absolute totally surprising bonkers, October surprise, that turned the election campaign on its head. It didn’t lose him the election (which everyone myself included, thought it had) because:

  • The GOP base doesn’t think habitual sexual abuse is a bad thing
  • There was a competing October surprise in Comey announcing there were more leaked Clinton emails to be considered. It was that October surprise that actually lost Clinton the election IMO. It totally dragged attention away from the admission of sex abuse because that’s how our political reporting works :pensive_face:
8

Re-reading the OP, I think there’s a misunderstanding of the term “October Surprise”. I don’t think there is any implication of skullduggery in the term, sure people have accused political organizations of keeping scandalous material to release at a damaging time, but that’s not what an “October surprise” is.

9

This is the first one that comes to mind. It hasn’t been proven conclusively, but the hostage release hours after Reagan took office is certainly suspicious.

There are many examples of the more traditional definition based on any big surprise, but other examples of ones that were potentially more nefarious:

  • LBJ called a halt to bombing in Vietnam on October 31, 1968 in hopes of helping Hubert Humphrey. The supposed peace fell apart days later. Nixon accused LBJ of timing it to the election, and LBJ accused Nixon of promising to support the South Vietnamese if they blocked the peace agreement.
  • Then on October 26, 1972, Kissinger announced “peace is at hand" at a press conference. The war of course went three more years.
  • Fox News broke the news of George W Bush’s 1976 drunk driving arrest a few days before the 2000 election. Maybe they happened to learn about it innocently that day, or maybe they were tipped.
10

1968 and 1972 are possibly good examples.

In 2000, though (not 2004 as I misremembered above), the source of the leak is known – Tom Connolly, a Democratic activist with no connection to the Gore campaign. So that wouldn’t fit the definition in the OP.

11

Oops, I was looking at dates and didn’t realize you already mentioned it (and knew more about it than me).

12

Interesting! So Fox was a real news station in 1976? Who would have thought

13

In case I’m not being whooshed, his arrest was in 1976, but it was reported on the eve of the 2000 election.

14

my bad, I should have said 2000 instead of 1976

15

I recall this too, W’s drunk driving arrest coming out a few days before the election.

How much of a drunk driver do you have to be to be ticketed for drunk driving in the 1970s in Texas, with your father being the head of the CIA.

16

Note the first use of the term was an false accusation that the opposition was up to something hinky it seems like using the term “October surprise” is a preemptive strike - “look over there - the other guy is up to something!”

17

TroutMan’s 1968 and 1972 examples firmly established the idea of the October Surprise. Even if it hasn’t really happened all that often since then (or, like Reagan in 1976, we didn’t find out about it until after the election) it firmly rooted the idea that ANY big news just before an election is a political manipulation.

18

True - I was thinking of the term, not the concept.

19

That was a bit before my time, but it makes a lot of sense.

20

Instead Bin Laden dropped a tape on Oct 24 2004 that pretty much insured Bush’s reelection.