As October comes to a close, the American media apparatus begins its biennial harvest. The “October surprise” is an event wherein political actors and campaigns unleash last-ditch negative PR about their opponents, while the media collects and reports it. The goal is to make a party’s opponent look personally bad, because a voter’s final decision almost certainly comes down to gut feeling, not policy considerations, if he or she is still undecided in October. 

The hope is that the voter sees the opponent on Election Day and goes “ew.” Eliminating oppositional votes in the final days is just as valuable as earning support in the early months.

Clever as the strategy is, the odds a story sticks are small. The “surprise” part of “October surprise” is when a story actually makes some difference in the election.

Influential surprises were the story of 2016. That October, Trump’s “Access Hollywood” footage was released, and WikiLeaks published decades’ worth of Clinton documents and correspondence. Trump’s vulgarity shocked undecided voters, strengthening Clinton’s attack on his temperament. Clinton’s history revealed her just as much of an ingenuine Washington politician as Trump accused her of being.

But 2020 was the exact opposite phenomenon. The New York Post released a bombshell report on Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his “laptop from hell” in October. The story was immediately smothered. Politico called it “Russian disinformation,” citing a letter signed by over 50 intelligence officials. Social media companies suppressed the story’s spread — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg later claimed this was prompted by an FBI warning. Only in June of this year did outlets finally acknowledge the laptop as authentic.

This year will be different from both its predecessors. Unlike 2016, everything is out in the open, and so, unlike 2020, there’s nothing left to hide. This race, short of a fatality, is surprise-proof.

Consider the candidates: Donald Trump is seeking a non-consecutive second term, hoping that the third time is the second charm. Kamala Harris received zero primary votes in both 2020 and 2024, but was nominated the second time around in the aftermath of this year’s first debate. Trump has been both president and in the media’s spotlight before, Harris has been periodically jumping into the public eye for four years only to be thrust front-and-center on short notice. 

There are no attacks left to throw at Trump. As if to underscore this point, The Atlantic broke a story on Oct. 22 in which retired General John Kelly replayed the hits. Similar to the September 2020 Atlantic report in which anonymous sources claimed that Trump called fallen soldiers “suckers and losers,” Kelly claims that an anonymous source told him that Trump disrespected fallen soldier Vanessa Guillén. In this instance, the man to whom the alleged remarks were made, Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, denies the claims, alongside another present official. Guillén’s sister announced she was voting for Trump, calling the Atlantic piece “hurtful & disrespectful.”

Team Trump’s negative PR against Harris, however, fares no better. Team Kamala continually tucks liabilities such as second gentleman Doug Emhoff out of sight, effectively nullifying attacks against him. Damage to the Harris campaign has been almost entirely self-inflicted. Off-script interviews and remarks on the campaign trail send her team into clean-up mode far more often than Trump’s accusations of lies, radicalism, or even the recent allegations of plagiarism.

All of this means that there will be no sympathy for the undecided voters of October. Shock isn’t an acceptable plea as it was in 2016, when liberals like Matt Drudge and Julian Assange understood those who stayed at home instead of voting Clinton and her DC status quo, and conservatives like Ben Sasse and JD Vance understood the Christians who didn’t go to the polls for Trump and his vulgarity. Likewise, ignorance isn’t acceptable like it was in 2020, when conservatives felt compassion toward voters who didn’t know about Hunter Biden’s exploits.

 This election, for better or worse, will tread the oft-visited ground of “us or them,” and the lines are already drawn. Whether, as many have speculated, this a Reaganesque moment of consensus or, as others argue, a Lincolnian moment of national divide — that is the real surprise, and it’s going to stand up very soon.

 

Lewis Thune is a junior studying history.