Meaning
A news event in the final weeks of a US presidential campaign - a scandal, crisis, leak, diplomatic breakthrough, or candidate-health shock - that breaks close enough to the November election to sway the result, deliberately or not, leaving the opposing side little time to respond. Specific to the fixed American election calendar; using it for other countries' late-campaign shocks is a borrowed, knowingly ironic application. Regional use: American English; increasingly noted in international election coverage.
Origin
The term was coined by William Casey, manager of Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign. He raised it with reporters on 17 July 1980 at the Republican convention - reported that day in the San Bernardino Sun - saying he feared President Carter would use the advantage of incumbency to spring a helpful event, above all a pre-election release of the American hostages in Iran. The columnist Jack Anderson used the phrase that autumn in the Washington Post. After the election it was applied retrospectively to earlier episodes, among them Kissinger's 'peace is at hand' declaration of 26 October 1972 and the forged Morey letter of 1880. The 1980 case itself bred a conspiracy theory that Reagan's team secretly delayed the hostage release; congressional investigations found no such plan, and the hostages were freed minutes after Reagan's inauguration in January 1981. Wiktionary's usage note records the tendency to apply the label to scandals in particular.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a late October surprise
- an October surprise
- October surprises
Usage Examples
- The October surprise arrived on the 28th: a leaked memo about the candidate's offshore accounts.
- Campaign veterans know an October surprise need not be manufactured - a hurricane or a market crash will do.
- Opposition researchers spent the autumn braced for an October surprise, but the news cycle stayed quiet.