Several faithful readers of this column who have followed it from the mid-2000s in the Weekly Trust have asked me to spice up my columns with occasional commentaries on American politics and culture, which was the column’s dominant thematic preoccupation in its earliest incarnation.
This year’s presidential election offers an opportunity to do that. This week I want to explore a phenomenon called the “October Surprise” in American presidential elections about which I had written 16 years ago when Barack Obama and John McCain squared off.
An “October Surprise” is any dramatic last-minute event, typically in October but occasionally a little later than October, that swings the election to the disadvantage of a leading candidate. Such dramatic events are believed to have the potential to influence the outcome of the election by swaying public opinion or shifting the narrative around the candidates.
October surprises symbolize the unpredictable nature of the final stretch of the presidential campaign and the high stakes involved in influencing the electorate.
Before talking about what this presidential election year’s October Surprise will be, I want to reference previous notable “October Surprises” and how they influenced the outcome of past elections.
The term “October Surprise” was coined during the 1980 presidential election between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter (the only president my state of Georgia has produced). A year before Election Day, radical Iranian students had invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, and held the Americans they found there hostage.
President Carter worked throughout the campaign to secure the release of the American hostages during which eight American servicemen were killed.
According to the Associated Press, “Critics say the Reagan team was so concerned that Carter would gain a boost by winning their release just before the election, that his campaign manager and others negotiated privately with the Iranians to ensure that did not happen.” This cost Carter the 1980 election.
But before October Surprise became entrenched in America’s political lexicon beginning in 1980, it happened eight years earlier. In 1972, according to American presidential historians, President Richard Nixon’s administration announced a potential breakthrough in the Vietnam peace talks, which bolstered Nixon’s re-election prospects. The war was a sticking point in the country.
During the 2000 presidential election, the October Surprise was a damning revelation that George W. Bush had been arrested for driving while he was drunk. It’s called DUI (i.e., driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs) here. It negatively impacted his image among voters, which probably caused him to lose the popular vote—and only narrowly win the Electoral College vote.
Bush became president only because of America’s strange, archaic, and convoluted system of electing presidents, which deprives voters of the opportunity to directly elect their presidents. He was declared president because he won the then battleground state of Florida by 537 votes out of nearly six million cast, which gave him the state’s Electoral College votes.
In the final weeks of the 2004 election, all the major polls predicted that John Kerry would defeat Bush. He was a bumbling, incompetent president who was very unpopular.
Then Osama bin Laden allegedly issued a videotape that criticized Bush and warned U.S. voters that “your security is in your own hands” in the election.
“It changed the entire dynamic of the last five days,” Kerry told newsmen in 2008. “We saw it in the polling. There was no other intervening event. We saw the polls freeze and then we saw them drop a point, because all the security moms, it agitated people over 9/11.”
There was also an October Surprise in the 2008 presidential election that nearly torpedoed Obama’s lead and punctured his campaign’s overweening confidence. On October 30, 2008, conservative British newspaper TimesOnline broke the news of Obama’s late father’s half-sister, identified as Zeituni Oyango, living in the United States illegally and that she first came to the U.S. on the invitation of Obama.
The woman was mentioned in Obama’s best-selling autobiography Dreams From My Father.
She was invited by Obama to the United States to witness his swearing-in as a U.S. senator. She returned to Kenya after Obama’s inauguration and came back again on her own. She applied for asylum, but her application was rejected and was ordered to be deported back to Kenya.
But she somehow escaped and had been living in the slums of Boston. The TimesOnline story initially did not gain traction in the United States until the Associated Press pounced on it and added a fresh dimension: that Obama’s aunt was not only here illegally but had contributed money to the Obama campaign, which violates America’s campaign laws, which stipulate that only U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents can contribute to political campaigns.
The news dramatized Obama’s “otherness” in more concrete ways than the McCain camp had tried vainly to do. Because AP’s reporting showed that the woman contributed up to $265 to the Obama campaign even though she was neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident, she helped to feed the Republican Party-inspired allegations that Obama’s unprecedented financial buoyancy was consequent on his receiving illegal donations from non-Americans.
What saved Obama was that Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, fell for a cheap prank by two well-known Canadian comedians by the names of Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel who go by the stage name “the Masked Avengers.”
They put a call through to Sarah Palin, which she picked. One of the comedians pretended to be then French president Nicholas Sarkosky. Palin believed him. And she went on for over 5 minutes discussing inane issues with the “ French president.” The conversation further betrayed her shallowness and ignorance of foreign policy issues.
This dominated the news cycle days before the election. Sarah Palin’s inability to detect that she was being tricked even in the face of so many red flags during the conversation had the effect of canceling out the scandal of Obama’s aunt living illegally in the US and making illegal donations to Obama’s campaign. (Obama’s aunt later became a legal permanent resident in 2010 but died four years later).
Finally, in the 2016 presidential election, FBI Director James Comey announced that a renewed investigation had been launched into Hillary Clinton’s email practices. This became a major talking point just 11 days before the election, which some argued influenced the final vote. Although she defeated Donald Trump by three million votes, America’s Electoral College system caused her to lose the presidency.
So what might be the October Surprise in this year’s presidential election? It’s hard to tell, particularly because Donald Trump is not a conventional candidate. He is the most morally flawed, most openly racist, and most explicitly psychologically damaged presidential candidate America has had in recent memory. Yet nothing seems to stick to him.
He once boasted that he could murder someone in broad daylight in the streets of New York and nothing would happen to him. He is what Americans call a “Teflon candidate.” Teflon is a substance used to cover the surface of cooking utensils, etc. in order to prevent extraneous substances from sticking to them).
If any candidate should be fearful of an October Surprise, it should be Vice President Kamala Harris, whom polls favor to win both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote and make history as the first woman to be president of the United States.
Had the attempt on Trump’s life taken place in October, that would have been the October Surprise that would hand him the presidency. Some people think it may happen again next month.
Farooq Kperogi, author and Professor of Journalism @KennesawState University, is a columnist with Nigerian Tribune