The idea of an “October Surprise” is a common trope in US politics. First coined in the 1980s, the idea refers to the possibility that some major unforeseen event elapsing within a month of the a scheduled US presidential election will be of such an impactful consequence it will alter the outcome of the election. Recent examples might include Trump’s October 2020 COVID diagnosis (an unforeseen event to be sure but unclear if it was impactful on the outcome of the election), and the announcement in late October of 2016 that the FBI was to open a new investigation of Hilary Clinton’s e-mails and the possibility she used a private account to send official communications in an effort to avoid public scrutiny. Unlike the COVID diagnosis with Trump, many argue news of this investigation cost Hilary Clinton the election.[1] Even when no “surprise” takes place, the fear that one might is often sufficient reason for candidates to take action. Indeed, the 1980 election which saw Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy Carter in a landslide victory became the backdrop of allegations that Ronald Reagan somehow arranged for the US hostages in Tehran to be kept in confinement until after the inauguration of Reagan as president based the fear the hostages coming home before the election (something Carter was claiming he was close to securing) would prove to be a boon to Carter’s re-election prospects.[2]

In all these accounts of an October Surprise, however, the assumption is the impactful election-altering episode event will be a single event of such great news-making gravity it will obscure the more banal coverage of the election and remain lodged at the top of the headlines for multiple weeks as the nation’s newsgathering apparatus devotes its resources into unearthing as many facets of the story as possible. Because of this staying power, the facts and consequences of the event follow the voters into the booth when they cast their ballots and thus possibly change the course of history. A candidate who may have seemed like a shoo-in (as perhaps Clinton was perceived to be in 2016) now finds themselves narrowly suffering a defeat.

Yet there is a new wrinkle on the October Surprise that one must consider in the age of the spectacle and the spectacular terrain of the digital media age. Indeed, one can already see it in looking at the frequency of October “surprises” that seem to increase once the world fully enters the digital media landscape. While the 1980s through the early 2000s saw few events that might be considered fully-fledged October Surprises, the 2016 election actually saw several. In addition to the FBI investigation of Clinton’s e-mails, there was also the earlier e-mail scandal coming from the online website Wikileaks releasing Clinton campaign e-mails stolen by a hacker as well the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape where Donald Trump uttered his now infamous line “grab them by the p#ssy.” The e-mail investigation turned out to be arguably the most impactful not because it was necessarily the most scandalous, but because it was the surprise that was sprung the closest to the day of the election. The 2020 election also saw multiple events that could all by themselves be considered October Surprises, (aside from Trump’s COVID was the death of Justice Bader Ginsburg and the accelerated effort to appoint Amy Coney Barrett to replace her and the notorious hullabaloo over Hunter Biden’s laptop), but were instead part of a larger constellation of spectacular events.

While some of these surprise events can be chalked up to natural processes outside human control (sickness and death), the others speak to a qualitatively different environment where the kinds of impactful events that might qualify as October Surprises are in some sense manufactured and distributed. As the digital media opens up ever greater potential sources and conduits of information and an increasingly organized and regimented system of amplification can take the most mundane kernel of information and turn it into the “next big thing,” the idea of a single election-altering event is eclipsed by an ever accelerating crescendo of event—each one rustling the fabric of time and space in a more violent way than its predecessor.

The closeness of the election in 2024 bears this out. As this post is being written on October 4^th, there are already several events being dubbed as an “October Surprise,” including the impact of Hurricane Helene, the release of Jack Smith’s summary of evidence against Trump in the January 6 case, the expansion of the war in the Middle East, a strike among American longshoremen (which was quickly albeit temporarily resolved) to say nothing of the lingering issues of Russia/Ukraine, the immigration debate and countless others that could flare-up to a more epic proportion in the coming days. The key question becomes whether this steady flow of crises, intrigues, scandals and tragedies reflects a more volatile world than what occurred in the past or if the digitized space layered over a traditional historical plane are generating spectacular events that might not otherwise have gotten the attention they now get.

As this space has argued consistently, the concept of the society of the spectacle put forth by Guy Debord in the 1960s goes a long way to answering this question. As he wrote in Paragraph 2, “The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at.”[3] These various October “surprises” have the effect of not merely impacting the outcome of the election, but of altering the terrain upon which the election is observed and understood. The sequence of each “surprise” event distorts the larger reality of the campaign process as sustained continuity or narrative about the candidates and their respective agendas and visions for the future cannot be properly expressed or observed. Cries of disgust on the lack of substantive debate on “issues” and the demand for detail on “policy” coming from reporters and pundits are thwarted by the organizations and companies many of these same individuals work for as the drive for television ratings, digital subscriptions and innumerable forms of social media “engagement” dictate that the stories told and information amplified be served-up in sweet bite-sized pieces to an audience that has lost the ability to handle complex renditions or analyses of reality. Any news outlet that focused only on “substance” would find itself quickly served up to private equity capital investors for liquidation.

On this spectacular terrain, the October Surprise goes from a curious but usually infrequent anomaly of an election year to a daily narrative battle. In the society of the spectacle, the October Surprise comes about not because of an external unforeseen event, but because an non-event of dubious importance is raised and amplified to a potential pivot point of world-historical consequence. Accusations by Trump and his surrogates of slow response times to the disastrous floods of southern Appalachia (including Trump’s own disruptive visits to some of these locations) require Harris, Biden and in many cases, the entire emergency relief apparatus of the federal government, to launch their own media holding action that also distracts from or inhibits actual rescue work. Like during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when local politicians and administrators were holding endless press conferences while a humanitarian crisis unfolded at the Superdome, the effort to “appear” to be doing something takes precedent or actually doing something, echoing the famous line from Debord: “The present stage, in which social life has become completely occupied by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing—all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.[4] The October Surprise comes about when one side fails to publicly respond to the narrative being generated by the opposition and not due to some organic event.

And the arrival of the election does not bring an end to the battle. The labels and themes of an “October Surprise” shift to a new package of labels as the spectacular terrain adjusts to conform to the social and material terrain to which it is connected like an adhesive. The expectation of a close election means a new “act” in the drama of US presidential politics begins as the outcomes of the election will most likely be challenged by the defeated party and the priority for the coverage of these events will continue to amplify the spectacular over the substantive. Indeed, one can anticipate these differing operational phases of the narrative battle at the heart of the current presidential election. Laying these different phases out will be the subject of a future post.  

[1] Daniel W Drezner, “Perspective: Will there be an ‘October surprise’ in foreign policy?” Washington Post, (September 9, 2020).

[2] Gary Sick. “The Election Story of the Decade”. The New York Times, (April 15, 1991).

[3] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (Berkley, California, 2014), 2.

[4] Ibid., 5.