Secretive talks in the waning days of a campaign. Furtive phone calls. Ardent public denials. American history is full of October surprises — late revelations, sometimes engineered by an opponent, that shock the trajectory of a presidential election and that candidates dread. In 1880, a forged letter ostensibly written by James Garfield claimed he wanted more immigration from China, a position so unpopular it nearly cost him the election. Weeks before the 1940 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s p
First Lady of the United States , model, and businesswomanPresident of the United States from 1933 to 1945President of the United States from 1981 to 1989 and actorPresident of the United States from 1969 to 1974American politician and First Lady of the United States Donald Trump, then a Republican Presidential candidate, at a campaign event in Dallas, Texas on June 16, 2016.
“There have been three cases at a minimum,” said Gary Sick, a former national security aide to Carter who for more than two decades has been pursuing his case that the Reagan campaign in 1980 delayed the release of the hostages from Iran. “And if you had the stomach for it, you’d have to say it worked.
The concept of an October surprise has been around American politics since at least 1838, when federal prosecutors announced plans to charge top Whig Party officials with “most stupendous and atrocious fraud” for paying Pennsylvanians to vote in New York for their candidates. “It is probably as old as campaigning itself,” said John Dean, the Nixon White House lawyer whose testimony before the congressional Watergate committees helped bring to light perhaps the most famous campaign dirty trick of all time. “I’m sure that when campaigns learn of negative stories, they do all they can to suppress them.”
Daniels’ claim that she had sex with Trump in 2006 while his wife, Melania, was nursing their only baby had been floating around since 2011, seemingly raising few fears in Trump world. But in early October 2016, that changed when The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump described in lewd terms how he groped women.
“All I know is there’s concern, not just with us but I think generally amongst the electorate, well, this Carter’s a politically tough fellow, he’ll do anything to get reelected, and let’s be prepared for some October surprise,” Reagan’s running mate, George H.W. Bush, said at the time.
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