October Surprise: Four election moments that changed history

The pivotal last-minute events that can throw elections usually come in ones, not threes

The last weeks of a presidential election are often spent waiting for an “October Surprise” – a miraculous or devastating last-minute event that tips the electorate one way or another.

An event ostensibly (but not always) beyond either major candidate’s control, the October Surprise casts one or the other as manifestly suited to the moment or somehow too compromised to get behind.

This year, October has scarcely begun and there’ve been at least three pivotal events in just a couple of weeks: the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and ensuing Supreme Court nomination; the first presidential debate, at which Donald Trump told the extremist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”; and the president’s testing positive for the coronavirus, entombing him under quarantine in the White House while Joe Biden clings to a steady poll lead.

Because most American elections are not landslides, tipping a relatively small section of the electorate one way or another can make all the difference. And that in turn creates an incentive not just to hope for an October Surprise, but to generate one – or avert it.

Peace can wait

In 1968, when Richard Nixon swept back into politics after years in the wilderness, he and his future secretary of state Henry Kissinger ran secret messages to the South Vietnamese government imploring leaders not to engage in peace talks, claiming that the negotiations would have a better chance of succeeding if Mr Nixon became president.

Whether entirely down to them or not, the failure to achieve a peace breakthrough withheld a In the end, he just barely edged out Hubert Humphrey – in an eerie parallel with Donald Trump, winning an electoral college victory only by narrowly capturing three key states.

Hostages to fortune

So strange an affair that the House of Representatives created an October Surprise Task Force to look into it, the conclusion of the Iranian Hostage Crisis in January 1981 was for many people just a bit too well-timed.

Jimmy Carter had spent much of 1980 trying and failing to rescue 52 Americans captured during the Iranian revolution. A low point came in April with the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw, an aborted attempt to retrieve the hostages that saw several American servicemen killed in a helicopter crash in the desert.

When a resolution to the hostage crisis was ultimately concluded after the election, and the last hostages released to US authorities on the same day as Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, conspiracy theories abounded that the Reagan campaign had somehow negotiated with the Iranians not to release the hostages before the election. The house investigation never proved this.

Too big to fail

Well beyond the control of Barack Obama and John McCain, and indeed of anyone else, the financial crash that hit the US in the autumn of 2008 utterly upended an already epochal campaign.

Not strictly an October surprise as it unfolded over several weeks, the global collapse took a steep dive after Lehman Brothers collapsed on 15 September and forced both candidates to react to an economic crisis like nothing seen in their lifetimes.

Mr McCain had already been hamstrung by the public implosion of Sarah Palin, whose ignorance of basic facts about politics, economics and global history shone through in a series of calamitous.

The perception of his poor judgment in choosing her undercut any credibility he might have wielded in the crisis, and his repeated insistence that “the fundamentals of our economy our strong” sounded bizarre in the awful circumstances facing the country.

You’ve got mail

Perhaps the single most devastating October surprise, though – this year’s disasters aside – came just four years ago.

Hillary Clinton wrote an entire book, What Happened, picking over the election she lost to Donald Trump. In a chapter titled “Why”, she picks over all the factors at work, and asks: “What happened in the homestretch that caused so many voters to turn away from me? First, and most importantly, there was the unprecedented intervention by then FBI director Jim Comey.”

When Mr Comey announced a week and a half before the election that the investigation into Ms Clinton’s emails was back on, the result was days of breathless media coverage that confirmed many voters’ lingering suspicion that “something” must be going on.

In the end, the investigation found nothing new and was wrapped up two days before election day, but by then, the damage had been done – as the Clinton campaign’s focus groups showed. Some pollsters say the letter caused a swing against her as large as 4 points.

She effectively lost the election by less than 100,000 votes spread across three states, robbing her of victory in the electoral college even as she won the national popular vote by nearly 3 million.