In the politics of the United States, an October surprise is a news event that may influence the outcome of an upcoming November election (particularly one for the presidency), whether deliberately planned or spontaneously occurring.
[3] In 1844, an abolitionist newspaper published an article, purportedly based on a book titled Roorback's Tour Through the Southern and Western States in the Year 1836, implying that James K. Polk had his slaves branded.
[5] On October 20, 1880, shortly before the 1880 presidential election, a forged letter was published purportedly written by James A. Garfield voicing support for Chinese immigration to the United States.
[3] In the week leading up to the 1884 presidential election, Republican nominee James G. Blaine attended a meeting in which Presbyterian preacher Samuel D. Burchard claimed that the Democrats were the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion".
Blaine's failure to object to Burchard's message cost him support from anti-prohibitionists, Roman Catholic immigrants, and southerners, playing a role in his narrow loss to Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland.
[6] The letter had a galvanizing effect on Irish-American voters exactly comparable to the "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" blunder of the previous presidential election[7] by trumpeting Great Britain's support for the Democrats.
[8][3] Less than a month before the 1940 presidential election, President Roosevelt's press secretary Stephen Early kneed a black police officer in the groin outside Madison Square Garden.
A week later, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power by hardliners in the Soviet Union, the Labour Party won the United Kingdom election, and China conducted its first nuclear weapons test.
[3] During the 1968 presidential election, Hubert Humphrey—who was rising sharply in the polls due to the collapse of the George Wallace vote—began to distance himself publicly from the Johnson administration on the Vietnam War, calling for a bombing halt.
The key turning point for Humphrey's campaign came when President Johnson officially announced a bombing halt, and even a possible peace deal, the weekend before the election.
In addition, Senator Eugene McCarthy finally endorsed Humphrey in late October after previously refusing to do so, and by election day the polls were reporting a dead heat.
During the 1972 presidential election between the Republican incumbent Richard Nixon and the Democratic nominee George McGovern, the United States was in the fourth year of negotiations to end the lengthy and domestically divisive Vietnam War.
On October 26, 1972, twelve days before the election on November 7, the United States' chief negotiator and presidential National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger appeared at a press conference held at the White House and announced "We believe that peace is at hand.
[12] In the 1980 presidential election, Republican challenger Ronald Reagan feared that a last-minute deal to release American hostages held in Iran might earn incumbent Jimmy Carter enough votes to win re-election.
The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives."
[19] Jack Anderson wrote an article in The Washington Post in the fall of 1980 about a possible October surprise, in which he alleged that the Carter administration was preparing a major military operation in Iran for rescuing U.S. hostages in order to help him get re-elected.
[14] Gary Sick, member of the U.S. National Security Council under Presidents Ford and Carter (before being relieved of his duties weeks into Reagan's term),[21] made the accusation in a New York Times editorial[22] in the run-up to the 1992 election.
[24][25] Abolhassan Banisadr, the former President of Iran, has also stated "that the Reagan campaign struck a deal with Tehran to delay the release of the hostages in 1980", asserting that "by the month before the American Presidential election in November 1980, many in Iran's ruling circles were openly discussing the fact that a deal had been made between the Reagan campaign team and some Iranian religious leaders in which the hostages' release would be delayed until after the election so as to prevent President Carter's re-election.
[31][32][33] Although he claims to have been opposed to the sale on principle, Weinberger participated in the transfer of United States TOW missiles to Iran that were used to stop Saddam Hussein's massive tank army, and was later indicted on several felony charges of lying to the Iran-Contra independent counsel during its investigation.
[36][33] On October 2, 2003, the Los Angeles Times released a story about Arnold Schwarzenegger and subsequent allegations that he was a womanizer guilty of multiple acts of sexual misconduct in past decades.
[44] The Mark Foley scandal, in which the congressman resigned over sexual computer messages that he exchanged with underage congressional pages, broke on September 28, 2006, and dominated the news in early October.
[48] On October 31, 2008, four days before the 2008 presidential election, the Associated Press reported that Zeituni Onyango, half-aunt of Democratic candidate Barack Obama, was living as an illegal immigrant in Boston.
This was announced after newly discovered emails were found on a computer that was seized by the FBI during an investigation of former congressman Anthony Weiner who had been accused of sending explicit pictures to a minor.
[59][60][61] Almost all ended up being duplicates, and when Comey revealed that the investigation found nothing on November 6th, some Clinton aides later worried that it put the emails back in the news cycle two days before the election.
On October 3, 2022, The Daily Beast reported that former football player Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee in the 2022 United States Senate election in Georgia, paid for his wife's 2009 abortion despite claiming to be "100% pro-life".
[78][79][80][81] A poll among Latino voters in Pennsylvania showed that 69% of respondents found the joke to be “more racist than humorous” while 51% indicated that the remarks at the Trump rally influenced their voting preference towards Harris.