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What Is an October Surprise?
In the waning days of the 1980 presidential campaign between incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican Ronald Reagan, the polls showed a close race. Carter had been weakened by the Iran hostage crisis, which had riveted the country for the previous year, but the Reagan campaign worried that if Carter secured a hostage release just before voters headed to the polls, the election would be his. Reagan campaign manager William Casey had coined the term “October surprise” back in 1968 for this kind of game-changing political maneuver.
The reality is that late-breaking events—whether involving scandal, global conflict, or natural disasters—have played a role in U.S. political campaigns for the better part of two centuries. Their effectiveness has been mixed, and as early voting has become more prevalent in the 21st century, the timing of such surprises has become more complex: If the goal is to sway voters, then the surprise needs to come before they head to the polls.
Here is a timeline of some electoral surprises and their impacts. As you’ll see, not all of them occurred in October. You may also see ways in which, when it comes to politics, some historical “surprises” may echo even if they don’t repeat.
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1840: Voter fraud roils an election
The presidential election of 1840 arguably didn’t go very well for either the challenger William Henry Harrison or the incumbent Martin Van Buren.
Van Buren, a Democrat, perhaps sensing the electorate’s dissatisfaction with him amid difficult economic times, had a plan to paint Harrison’s Whig Party as politically corrupt. In October 1840 Democratic federal prosecutors alleged that Whig politicians in New York had paid Pennsylvanians to come vote multiple times in New York elections in 1838. Van Buren was playing the voter fraud card and he knew it, telling friends that he had “a card to play that nobody could dream of.” At first, it seemed like the ploy might work. The Washington Globe trumpeted the scandal with the headline “A Gigantic Plot to Elect Harrison President By Fraud,” and ultimately one of the Whigs involved in the scheme admitted the charges were true. The problem was that voters seemed to shrug at the revelation, perhaps even then distrustful of politicians in general. Harrison went on to beat Van Buren by six points.
Harrison, famously, didn’t have much time to enjoy his victory. He caught a cold that developed into pneumonia while delivering his inaugural address and died a month later.
1920: The scourge of a “Black” president
As the election of 1920 approached, the United States was in the middle of a malaise. Still reeling from the trauma of World War I and the devastating flu pandemic of 1918–19, Americans were heading to the polls to choose a successor to Woodrow Wilson, who had been largely disabled by a stroke. Republican Warren G. Harding was a senator from Ohio facing that state’s Democratic governor, James Cox.
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Harding promised a return to “normalcy,” and for weary Americans that seemed to be enough to secure a victory. In October, however, Wooster College Professor William E. Chancellor, widely recognized as a scientific racist, began spreading a rumor that Harding had “Negro blood.” Such an allegation was seen as having the potential to sway Southern white voters, and the Harding campaign launched a vigorous campaign to document his European lineage. The candidate himself seemed less concerned about the topic, famously and crudely telling friends that perhaps one of his ancestors had “jumped the fence.”
Ultimately, voters decided that any potential shame associated with a Black president was more than outweighed by a desire to not have another Democrat in the White House. Harding won in a landslide.
1972: “Peace is at hand”
So let’s be clear: Richard Nixon was never going to lose the 1972 presidential election. That raises the question of why, in October 1972, even after negotiations to end the Vietnam War had gone off the rails, Nixon’s National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger declared at a Washington, D.C., press conference that “peace is at hand.”
Though bringing an end to the highly divisive war—which Nixon had promised to do when running in 1968—would certainly have been a boost to his electoral aspirations, Nixon still went on to win 49 states and 520 electoral votes over his Democratic opponent, George McGovern. The Vietnam peace talks would completely fall apart by December 1972, dragging the war out until April 1975. By that time Nixon would no longer be president because of another inexplicable decision made on behalf of the president’s reelection: the Watergate break-in.
1980: The surprise that never was
It’s fair to say that after the presidential election of 1980, the phrase “October surprise” became part of the political lexicon. What is less easy to understand is what happened in the weeks leading up to Election Day around negotiations to free the 52 American hostages who had been held captive by Iran since November 4, 1979.
As noted, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey had expressed concern that the troubled Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter would try to secure the hostages’ release and in turn secure an election victory. (The Carter administration had previously tried to free the hostages in a disastrous raid in April 1980 that left eight U.S. service members dead.)
The countervailing part of this (conspiracy) theory was that the Reagan campaign, led either by vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush or Casey (both of whom had espionage backgrounds), had met with the Iranians to discourage the release of the hostages before the election.
Ultimately, Iran freed the hostages on January 20, 1981, just minutes after Reagan had taken the oath of office, in what is widely seen as a final humiliation of Carter by the Iranians. More than a decade later the U.S. House and Senate both conducted investigations and a House task force declared:
There is no credible evidence supporting any attempt…by the Reagan presidential campaign—or persons representing or associated with the campaign—to delay the release of the American hostages in Iran.
2000: Bush DUI
Let’s start by setting the record straight: The news that Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush had been arrested in 1976 and charged with driving under the influence broke on November 2, 2000, five days ahead of the 2000 presidential election and thus too late to truly be an October surprise.
In every other way, the 24-year-old news that Bush, who at the time was locked in a close race with Vice Pres. Al Gore, had been arrested in Maine and that the details of the arrest had never before been made public was a textbook preelection stunner.
When the news broke, Bush immediately spoke to the media, confirming the reports and saying, “I’m not proud of that. I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much, and I did that night. I learned my lesson.” Bush did hint that he thought he knew who was behind the leak, saying, at one point, “I’ve got my suspicions.” For its part, the Gore campaign denied having any role in the story.
You can be forgiven if this is not the event that you recall most about the 2000 presidential election. Voters went to the polls on November 7 but didn’t learn who had been elected until 35 days, seemingly endless recounts, and one Supreme Court ruling later.
2004: Bin Laden video
The 2004 presidential campaign was run with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent Iraq War casting big shadows. The election put George W. Bush, who in 2000 won the closest and most contentious election in U.S. history, against Democratic Sen. John Kerry.
Polls indicated that the election would be tight, with Bush facing the prospect of being a defeated incumbent as his father had been. On October 27, 2004, Bush got support from the most unlikely of corners in the form of a new video from al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. The video, the first from bin Laden in more than a year, mentioned both Bush and Kerry by name, but bin Laden cast Bush as the villain, speaking to the American people and saying: “Despite entering the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you, and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.”
It’s widely seen that having bin Laden cast Bush as the enemy gave a boost to his campaign in the waning days, although no one ever accused him of being in league with the terrorist to do so.
2016: A video, emails, and a reopened investigation
The 2016 presidential election pitted Republican Donald Trump, a billionaire real estate mogul with no public service record, against Democrat Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, U.S. senator, and secretary of state. As October dawned, Clinton held a lead but not an overwhelming one.
In the late afternoon of October 7, 2016, The Washington Post published one of the most stunning October surprises imaginable. They had obtained a videotape from 11 years earlier of outtakes from an Access Hollywood interview between Trump and host Billy Bush. In crass, unapologetic terms, Trump discussed how he groped and kissed women, claiming, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
Hours after the news of the taped comments broke, WikiLeaks began publishing a trove of emails that it said it had obtained from the personal account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. The Clinton campaign blamed Russia for the leak, but Trump said that the potential improper handling of sensitive materials was a far more damaging story than his vulgar conversations about women.
Then, on October 28, less than two weeks before the election, FBI Director James Comey, who in July had closed an investigation into Clinton’s emails, sent a three-paragraph note to Congress saying that because new emails had come to light the bureau would “take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information.”
The public disclosure was explosive, and although Comey announced on November 2, just days before the election, that they had found no wrongdoing, the damage was already done. According to Rutgers University history professor David Greenberg:
The only October Surprise that seems to have had a direct impact on the outcome of the election was Comey’s investigation of Clinton. After that announcement, her lead over Trump narrowed and put him in striking distance.
2024: October comes early
The 2024 presidential election set up a rematch of the 2020 race. Except this time Democrat Joe Biden was the incumbent and Republican Donald Trump was the challenger. Despite significant Democratic hand-wringing over Biden’s age and his ability to serve as president for another four years (he would have been 81 on Election Day), the Biden campaign was confident that the only person who had defeated Trump could do it again. They were so confident, in fact, that they lobbied for and got an early presidential debate—on June 27, 2024.
The debate was shockingly disastrous for Biden. Sick with a cold and exhausted from weeks of foreign travel, he looked every one of his 81 years and then some, stumbling over answers and seeming to lose his train of thought. Almost immediately, there were calls for Biden to get out of the race. Biden ultimately did so on July 21, endorsing Vice Pres. Kamala Harris as his successor. She lost the race to Trump.
In 2024 there was no real October surprise: October had come in June.