‘October Surprise’: The U.S. election phenomenon that can sway a presidential race

Few American presidential elections have sailed all the way through to Election Day without one – or more – unexpected news events, sometimes turning a race totally on its head. This last-minute phenomenon is known as an “October Surprise” and has changed the course of more than one US election over the past 50 years.

On October 26, 1972 – just days before the American people were due at the ballots – President Richard Nixon’s security adviser, Henry Kissinger, suddenly declared that peace was “at hand” in the costly and controversial US war effort in Vietnam. Although Nixon had already been widely slated to win, and the initial peace talks would fall apart less than two months later, the sudden prospect of peace essentially handed Nixon the victory on a silver platter. He ended up winning the national popular vote by a landslide, beating his opponent by 18 million votes.

The event is widely considered to be the “original” October Surprise in US politics, and began to be referred to as such by US media and politicians alike in the early 1980s.

“Essentially it is something unexpected that happens very late, usually in October, in the campaign phase to influence the result,” explained Oscar Winberg, a specialist in US politics at Finland's Turku Institute for Advanced Studies.

Three types of surprises

Winberg said there are three general categories of "October Surprises": a sudden US diplomatic development on the international stage, a political scandal from the past that is brought into light through a leak, or a large domestic news event in the form of, for example, a natural catastrophe, a pandemic, or the launch of a criminal investigation.

One of the most eventful – and some say fateful – October Surprises came in 2016. The Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump race was impacted by no less than four surprise news events in the scope of just 28 days.

That year, the month of October started out with the New York Times publishing Trump’s 1995 tax returns, showing that the $900 million loss he had claimed back then may have allowed him to dodge federal taxes for the nearly two decades that followed.

A week later, the Julian Assange-run whistleblower website WikiLeaks began publishing emails and that had been hacked from Clinton’s campaign. Among other things, the emails contained excerpts of paid speeches Clinton had given to elite US financial firms. The speeches, which Clinton had refused to disclose to the public, contained comments in which she appeared to embrace many of the values held by the ultra-rich. She also praised a budget plan that would result in social security cuts and admitted feeling “far removed” from the middle class and their hardships – despite claiming she was fighting for them when she was on the campaign trail.

The day after, on October 8, a new bombshell dropped: a 2005 recording in which Trump had been caught boasting about groping women and saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it”.

Just at the close of the month, on October 28, it was Clinton’s turn again. This time, James Comey, then director of the FBI, unexpectedly announced that the bureau would resume an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server when sending emails.

Devlin Barret, a reporter at the Washington Post, wrote in his 2020 book “October Surprises” that even though Comey did not say anything about what Clinton’s emails contained, the news of the resumed probe “cost her the race”.

Preparation and fear

Although there are many occasions in which an October Surprise did not influence an election outcome to a great extent – in 2000, George W. Bush survived the revelation that he had been arrested for drink driving in the 1970s – the phenomenon has become an election factor many candidates fear.

In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan even went as far as to warn the electorate that his opponent, then president Jimmy Carter, had a potential October Surprise up his sleeve. Reagan and his campaign team claimed that the US leader would try to time the negotiated release of the 52 Americans being held hostage in Iran for the past year to try sway the election in his favour.

That surprise never materialised, however. The hostages were instead freed on January 20, 1981, the same day Reagan was inaugurated as US president.

Winberg said that October Surprises have now become so common that they are preemptively taken into account by campaign teams.

“They take these potential surprises very seriously,” he said, noting that the campaign teams have crisis management plans in place should they have to deal with one. But they also try to uncover potential October Surprises that will play in their favour.

“In American politics, an enormous amount of time and money is invested in what is known as ‘opposition research’, where you investigate the opponent to try to find skeletons in the closet,” he said.

They also investigate themselves. Just in case.

“It’s normal practice for a candidate to hire an investigator to dig into their own backgrounds to try to find things that they themselves might be blind to, but that would look bad to the broader American audience if it came out,” he said.

Less dangerous than they used to be

Although October Surprises might have become more common in recent years –especially because of foreign election interference and various disinformation campaigns – Winberg said they have lost some of their former power.

“They’re less significant than they used to be,” he said, noting that there are far fewer undecided voters to influence nowadays, since most voters now stay loyal to the party they have always voted for.

“In the polarised, two-party system that exists in the US today, each side enjoys support of between 45-47 percent, so there really aren’t that many more voters to convince. But at the same time, that means that small changes can make the difference.”

The other trend, he said, is that an increasing number of Americans cast their ballots early, through postal votes. This trend was especially spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“And so the last-minute news developments that could have been perceived as game-changers previously aren’t as important as they used to be.”