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With less than a month until the US election, the Listener’s Washington DC columnist Jonathan Kronstadt’s weekly column surveys the weighty, the weird and the wonderful from the Harris vs Trump race for the presidency.
If you asked all 224 million eligible voters in the US what an “October surprise” is, I imagine too many million would reckon it’s some kind of pumpkin-spiced casserole with a surprising and likely unwelcome ingredient, say, marshmallows or celery.
When it comes to presidential elections, however, the term refers to an unexpected, momentous, and late-breaking event that carries the potential to change and/or determine the outcome.
The US has a rich past and frightening present when it comes to October surprises. I still get chills when I hear the name Jim Comey, the former FBI director whose late-October letter informing Congress and the US electorate that he was reopening the email investigation likely cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election and gave us President Donald Trump.
Eight years and a steep hike in Maga malevolence later, the mind reels at the possible October surprises that might be unleashed on the electorate by a political party that has exploded all previous norms and guardrails.
October surprises began with a bang in the mid-1800s. In 1840, Whig Party officials were accused of paying voters to cross state lines to vote. In 1844, an abolitionist newspaper implied Democratic nominee James K. Polk branded his slaves like cattle, apparently because owning slaves wasn’t alone disqualifying, and by the way, he won. And in “the more things change the more they stay the same” department, in 1880 a forged letter was published purportedly written by Republican nominee James A. Garfield voicing support for Chinese immigration to the US. Lies about immigration, who knew?
Dirty tricks and US politics go together like hipsters and single-origin coffee. In 1980, Ronald Reagan officials reportedly worked behind the scenes to keep the US hostages in Iran from being freed before the election, and it worked—they were released minutes after Ronnie’s inauguration.
Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign is the poster child for sheer quantity of dirty tricks, as he employed a phalanx of tricksters for everything from fake letters claiming Democratic candidates had fathered out-of-wedlock children to dropping mice into press conferences to sending fake invites to African diplomats for Democratic fundraising dinners. None of that rose to Watergate scandal level, but it all came from the same Machiavellian machine.
Nixon’s trickery seems almost quaint by today’s standards, mostly because we seem to no longer have any standards. Think about the election-shaking events that happened this summer: Trump gets convicted of 34 felonies, the incumbent president drops out of the race, two assassination attempts—it’s enough already.
But here comes October with, so far, one major hurricane (Helene) and another even stronger one (Milton) on the way, a dock workers’ strike that threatened to upend supply chains and further raise prices, a new report further indicting Trump for horrifying behaviour on January 6, and an expanding war in the Middle East.
It’s dispiriting to think there are undecided voters who might make their decision based on the current administration’s response to a hurricane, but what’s gut-wobblingly worrisome is what a party led by a sociopath might be capable of as the election draws near.
AI and social media have fuelled a misinformation tsunami that floods our cell phones and email inboxes on an hourly basis, but it’s oddly comforting that snail mail hasn’t been completely abandoned.
It seems a woman in a Philadelphia suburb received a letter that looked like an official document from the Pennsylvania Congressional Office of Immigration Affairs telling her that she was expected to provide living space to five migrants under a programme written into law by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. No such office or programme exists, of course, but that’s not the point.
The flip side of all this is that it’s entirely possible the US electorate has been so numbed by the countless cataclysms of this stormy summer that the imagination strains to fashion anything that would move the needle at this late date. The biggest, most unlikely, and certainly most welcome surprise would be for us all to wake up on November 6 with Donald Trump having, 1. grown tired of pureeing American democracy and the rule of law, and, 2. conceded defeat.
