by Victor Davis Hanson
The October Surprise is usually defined as the well-known (more often left-wing) tactic of creating or spreading news just before the vote in order to surprise a rival without giving him enough time to react or frigid down.
Recall the surprising last-minute disclosure, five days before the 2000 election, that candidate George W. Bush had been charged with driving under the influence of alcohol more than a quarter-century earlier. This surprise could have cost Bush the popular vote that year.
Sometimes a person in power can utilize his or her power to skew an election. Joe Biden benefited ahead of the 2022 midterm elections when leftist activists broke news of the Supreme Court’s impending overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Biden closer to actual vote Biden has sought to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt owed to the federal government. He has also started depleting strategic oil reserves to lower gas prices (which he is also doing again in an election year). Not surprisingly, the Republican Party’s predicted mid-term red wave ended in a diminutive wave.
More often than not, October surprises are more of an ad hominem nature and are caused by allegedly previously undisclosed mistakes by a rival.
Late in the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s team released information about the phony “Steele Dossier” she had purchased as alleged evidence of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia.
On the eve of the final presidential debate of 2020, Joe Biden delegated current Secretary of State Antony Blinken to work with former interim CIA director Mike Morrell to nab “51 former intelligence officials.” They allegedly lied that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was likely the product of a Russian intelligence “disinformation” operation.
The ruse turned out to be effective – it turned potential evidence of corruption in the Biden family into a repeat of the false hoax regarding Trump’s collusion with Russia in 2016.
This time, clearly the Harris campaign couldn’t wait until October or early November to deliver its surprises.
Perhaps the Harris campaign’s impatience stems from Democratic-inspired sweeping changes to state voting laws.
Remember that in 2020, under the guise of Covid-19, Democratic legal teams changed state laws to institutionalize early and mail-in voting in key states. These changes turned our once-iconic Election Day into a mere construct in which only 30 percent of voters cast their ballots.
So the senior October surprises – both embarrassing disclosures and the utilize of office to skew the election – now become earlier and more constant anticipatory “September” shocks.
Suddenly, the Federal Reserve Bank, just 50 days before the election, decided that interest rates, which had soared under the Biden-Harris administration in response to hyperinflation, must now be lowered – ostensibly as evidence that Biden-Harris inflation was already has ended and that the economy needs a sudden revival.
Just as suddenly, on September 23, just 43 days before Election Day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was flown by the Biden-Harris administration – at the expense of the US government – to the United States.
More astonishingly, Zelensky landed first in the critical state of Pennsylvania, where most observers believe the currently deadlocked election will be decided.
Not surprisingly, Zelensky immediately visited a munitions plant in Pennsylvania that was producing artillery shells likely intended for his Ukraine — at a time when voters in that state fear job losses.
The Harris-Biden administration has sent a not-so-subtle signal that providing Zelensky’s Ukraine with billions of dollars in weapons translates into jobs for voting Pennsylvanians.
But that’s not all of this primitive September surprise.
In an interview with a left-wing Biden-Harris supporter New Yorker magazine, Zelensky immediately threw himself into the current neck-to-neck presidential race. He denigrated Harris’ rival, Donald Trump, as someone who “doesn’t really know how to stop a war, even if he thinks he does.”
Dissatisfied with the criticism, the Ukrainian president hit out at Trump associate and vice presidential candidate JD Vance even harder, labeling him “dangerous” and “too radical.”
The left continues to talk non-stop about the nonexistent Trump-Russia “collusion” in 2016 and the equally false Trump-Russia “disinformation” in 2020.
However, it is complex to define a clearer “election intervention” than Zelensky’s current surprise.
After all, has any vice president running for president ever flown a foreign leader on an American military jet to the one key U.S. state likely to decide the upcoming election?
Furthermore, did someone parade him around that state’s arms export plant while he hurled insults at current Vice President Harris’ two opponents like “dangerous” and “radical”?
And why was Zelensky’s trip to Pennsylvania arranged differently by the Biden-Harris administration if it did not coincide with the conventional start dates for mail-in and early voting?
But was Zelensky’s sudden trip to Pennsylvania and his crude politicking at home and his slander of Trump and Vance so wise?
After all, Harris’ opponent, Donald Trump, had just escaped an assassination attempt by a pro-Ukrainian gunman – furious over Trump’s alleged preference for a negotiated settlement in a 30-month-long war that has killed a million people?
When you add it all up, it turns out that sometimes September backfires – when it appears to voters as crude and offensive rather than simply devious.
– – –
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness and a Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is an American military historian, columnist, former professor of classical philology and researcher of antique warfare.
