By You’re running a campaign. It’s going great. You’re up in the polls, you’re rolling in money, and all the news coverage is positive. Then just 4 weeks before Election Day, you wake up and your campaign has imploded.
You’ve been hit with an October surprise.
The October surprise is one of the most feared possibilities in politics. It’s basically any sudden, shocking news that drops in the month before Election Day and throws the race wildly off track.
You might be familiar with the concept from the 2016 election cycle, where we had no less than four October surprises.
- American intelligence services announced that Russia was attempting to influence the 2016 election by hacking US political groups.
- Wikileaks began leaking the emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
- The Access Hollywood tape featuring Trump bragging about committing sexual assault dropped.
- FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server.
(The first three events happened on the same day. 2016 was bonkers.)
The announcement of Russian hacking was basically blown out of the news by the Access Hollywood tape, but the other three had a bigger impact. The Podesta emails provided plenty of fodder for Clinton opponents. Access Hollywood nearly forced Trump to withdraw from the race, which would have been unprecedented at that late date. And the Comey letter probably cost Clinton the election.
So, October surprises are a big deal. They’re entirely unpredictable and difficult to deal with. The Comey letter was sent less than two weeks before Election Day; the Clinton campaign just didn’t have the time to reverse the torrent of negative coverage the letter produced.
Really, any major October news event can cause huge disruptions for campaigns. Take the Kavanaugh hearings as an example (even if they technically happened in September). It’s difficult to guess how the saga will affect voters.
The most obvious interpretation is that the sexual harassment charges against Kavanaugh and the GOP’s steadfast refusal to drop the judge will drive women voters further away from the GOP. In this model, the Kavanaugh hearings energize Democratic women and push swing voters more solidly into the Democratic column.
But Democrats are already energized leading up to this midterm election. They’re running an average of 8.3 (per FiveThirtyEight) points ahead of Republicans on the generic ballot, winning most forecasts for control of the House of Representatives, and dominating fundraising. There’s a distinct possibility of a historic wave that annihilates Republican control of the House. So, can they really get more energized?
Instead, there’s always the possibility that the heightened drama around Kavanaugh energizes Republican voters who may not have been planning to vote. There goes the blue wave.
So far, Democrats actually do seem more activated than Republicans by the Kavanaugh issue. ActBlue, a Democratic small-dollar online fundraising platform, reported its best ever fundraising day on September 30th ($16.8 million). Polls so far show public opinion moving against Kavanaugh and no swings in favor of the GOP. So perhaps Kavanaugh will help the Democrats after all.
But in an environment that is already deep blue, uncertainty is a risk for Democrats. The potential gain is just smaller than the potential loss.
To look at it from the GOP perspective: if you’re already down twenty points, it can’t really get much worse. But it can get much better.
Still, even an October surprise that breaks in favor of the GOP doesn’t guarantee anything for them. In 2012, Romney was consistently trailing Obama in polls when the American ambassador to Libya was killed in Benghazi. It seemed like a golden opportunity for Romney to cream Obama on foreign policy. Instead, he flubbed his attack in the second Presidential debate so badly the moderator actually stepped in to correct him. Benghazi made a comeback in 2016, but it didn’t help Romney much more after that.
So, an October surprise is always a huge risk, especially for a campaign in the lead. But it’s not a definite death sentence.
Still, October is a long month. There are 34 days left till the midterms. There’s plenty of time for things to go wrong.
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