Team News Riveting
With just a few days to pass while entering into a new calendar month, the “October Surprise” has haunted the election campaigns in the United States.
On October 26, 2016, the then-FBI director James Comey notified Congress that an investigation into Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was being reopened. The timing was everything. It came in October, just 11 days before Americans went to the voting booths to elect a new president.
News of the decision – related to a probe into whether Clinton had mishandled classified information through use of a private email server – dominated the US media cycle for several days. According to some pundits, it also tilted the election in Donald Trump’s favour, allowing him to pull off one of the biggest political upsets in American history.
Trump won the states by a smaller margin. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election loss has been attributed to the revelation that an investigation into her emails had been reopened.
George H.W. Bush was also a victim of “October Surprise”. He lost the 1992 election despite his heralded achievement a year earlier in pulling together a coalition army to expel invading Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
By the time the election rolled around nobody cared who won the (Gulf) war and they were focusing on things that were happening right then and there.
Such incidents are known in US political jargon as an “October surprise”, named because events in the month – contrived or otherwise – can have an outsize influence on US presidential elections, which are held in early November.
Political experts said October Surprise could make the difference among undecided or swing voters. It’s just a fact of history that voters are often more influenced by the things in the run-up to the election than things that happened a while ago.
Former members of the Trump administration have said the president is looking to spring an October surprise of his own to secure another four years in the White House in the election on November 3.
There are October scenarios that could benefit the Biden campaign. One is if Trump loses the long-running legal battle to turn over eight years of tax returns before November, though that is still tied up in the courts.
Trump has been hit by other controversies in September, such as an Atlantic magazine article that said, citing anonymous sources, he had disrespected the memory of US soldiers who died in battle, calling them “losers”. The White House has said the report is false and that Trump holds the military in the highest regard.
On September 15, Watergate reporter Bob Woodward published a book based on interviews with the president, which includes quotes that suggest Trump deliberately downplayed the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in February.
