October Surprise!
All the time spent trying to predict the “October surprise” is wasted time. The reason they call it an October surprise is that by definition it’s something no one saw coming. In most elections the “surprise” is that there is no October surprise.
But when there is occasionally an October surprise, much as no one was able to specifically see it coming, it’s typically something that plays on whatever narratives have been pushed throughout the election cycle. For instance, when the FBI Director falsely claimed ten days before the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was under criminal investigation over her emails, it only carried weight with persuadable voters because the Republicans and the media had already spent that entire election cycle falsely claiming that Hillary had an email scandal. It was all one big lie, but in the eyes of naive persuadable voters, it seemed to directly confirm what they’d been hearing about Hillary from the start.
This is, I believe, why Donald Trump’s Puerto Rico “garbage” scandal is having such a dramatic impact and is on the verge of becoming an October surprise. For nine years Trump’s detractors have consistently (and accurately) labeled him a racist. Trump himself has done plenty to help support this accusation over the years. But now, with a week left in the election, when people in the middle are finally paying attention to election news instead of blocking it out, Trump’s own highest profile campaign rally has turned out to be every bit as racist as his detractors have been claiming. This kind of thing makes it hard for voters in the middle to ignore, and easy to feel confident about how to vote.
This is why the Puerto Rico thing is playing so big, and why I believe it will continue to play big all week. It doesn’t matter that Trump himself didn’t make the remark. It doesn’t matter that his campaign tried disavowing the remark hours later. None of that matters, because everyone in the middle knows deep down that Trump is precisely this racist, and now Trump’s own closing campaign message just fessed up to it.
So yeah, this is big. I said going in that Trump’s New York City rally couldn’t possibly help him and could only end up costing him votes, given what an embarrassment it was likely to be. But even I wasn’t expecting it to be this on the nose. This is… huge.
That said, this isn’t over. Every (legitimate, honest) indicator says that Kamala Harris is likely on track to win. But do you really want to bet our futures on likely? Me neither. Do you really want to sit back and merely hope that Trump’s racist closing message drives enough people to the polls to secure the win for Kamala? With a week left, hope isn’t a strategy. The only strategy at this late date is to get out there and get Kamala Harris some more votes, whether that means going big by phone banking and door knocking, or going small by getting three people in your personal circle to show up and vote. If each of you does that this week, we’ll win for certain.
