The big October Surprise that Trump and his supporters have been threatening arrived Wednesday via the New York Post. It may be the dumbest October Surprise in history. Many of you probably were not expecting this, but Trumpland has not been subtle about some kind of “explosive news” that would be dropped about Biden and Burisma in October.
The term October Surprise goes back to at least the election of 1968, when Nixon’s camp thought that LBJ might end the war in Vietnam to help Humphrey across the finish line. That did not happen, but Johnson offered to halt bombing and began peace talks in Paris with Hanoi and Saigon. The real surprise was done by the Republicans and in secret. Henry Kissinger - who was part of the peace talks as a representative of the Johnson Administration - worked with another Nixon supporter who told South Vietnamese negotiators to wait it out and Nixon would give them a better deal. Team Nixon was probably right that the October Surprise they were expecting might have lost them the election. Humphrey gained momentum after Johnson’s announcement and lost the popular vote by the tiniest of margins.
If the overall narrative of 1968’s October Surprise sounds familiar but more recent to you, it’s because something similar may have taken place during the 1980 election. This was the beginning of what later became known as Iran-Contra. Reagan’s camp started making noises about a potential October Surprise by Carter months before the election. In April 1980 Carter ordered a military rescue of the hostages being held in Tehran at the US Embassy compound, which ended in disaster. Reagan’s camp thought Carter would try again in October. It has not been confirmed (Nixon’s sabotage of the 1968 peace talks has been confirmed), but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing to a Republican sabotage of hostage negotiations with Iran, again in Paris in October. William Casey, who went on to become Reagan’s CIA Director, was a participant in the negotiations, which Iran broke off abruptly in the middle of October. The hostages were later released on the day of Reagan’s inauguration and soon afterwards the administration began surreptitiously selling arms to the Tehran regime.
Those are two heavy episodes in American presidential history. There have been other events that folks refer to as October Surprises, and some are usually things out of either candidate’s control (like the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008). But yesterday’s October Surprise, like most attempts by Trumpland to look strong and smart, was not heavy; it was weak and dumb. Here’s what’s happened. With the possible assistance of Russian intelligence (who hacked Burisma’s servers in January), some guy who can’t keep his story straight claims that Biden’s son Hunter “probably” dropped off a laptop at his repair shop in Delaware and never retrieved it. For some reason, this guy made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Rudy Giuliani (which, if everything else is true, is probably a crime itself since the repairman had no legal authority to do that).* Then, he turned the laptop over to the FBI (who subpoenaed it, but he claims he contacted them first, but has not been consistent about that). The laptop contains items that appear to be emails by Hunter Biden about Burisma (but are hardly a “smoking gun” about anything despite Trumpland messaging) and, according to the Post, a video that allegedly shows Hunter smoking crack and engaged in sex with someone. Even if all of this is true, it is such small potatoes.
Let’s take a look at what this episode says about the Trump campaign. First, it is cruel. Hunter Biden is admittedly an addict. Far too many American families know how difficult it is when their children or parents or siblings become addicts. Joe Biden has been Joe Biden through this: he loves his children and grandchildren; understands first-hand how tragedy impacts families, and; does what he can to support his son. Still, Trumpland wants to beat Joe by destroying Hunter - maybe even pushing him to the break of suicide. It’s not clear anyone in the GOP would care if that happened.
Second, it is incompetent. This “surprise” was planned by Trumpland to land exactly when it did in an effort to derail Biden and win the election. The story would be run in a right wing blog which would then be covered by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post as a news story. Then, Trumpland would push it out over social media forcing the rest of the media to cover it. (For people who claim to hate the mainstream media they are awfully reliant upon it for amplification.) Then, the noise from the coverage would damage Biden the way the Comey letter damaged Clinton in 2016. Regarding this plan, their assumptions were wrong and they ran into more than one problem with their social media strategy.
Here are the reasons Trumpland’s assumptions about the effectiveness of this plan were and are wrong. There are two important failures here that reasonable politicos would understand. First, regardless of what you say in public you cannot believe your own bullshit. Second, do not make the mistake of fighting the last war. Trumpland seems to believe that Trump won in 2016 because he has political instincts like no other. However, 2016 was a fluke. The race was close in a number of states and he squeezed out an electoral vote majority while losing the popular vote by three million. The race was so close that if Clinton had focused on the Great Lake states in the last week of the campaign she might have overcome that 80,000 vote deficit across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That’s no genius; it’s much more in line with plain old dumb luck. It also relates to the second failure.
For over a year now - actually, probably for several years - Trump has been running against Biden as if he were Clinton and he could just replicate the 2016 election. However, Biden has proven very resilient to attacks on his integrity, character, and age. The most important reason why he has proven resilient is because in politics attacks tend to work best when they reinforce pre-existing narratives about a candidate. Biden has a long reputation for being a decent, empathetic person who is liked by just about everyone who knows him. Clinton, on the other hand, had endured over 20 years of attacks by right wingers that had already damaged her reputation among a lot of voters by the time 2016 arrived. The Comey letter reinforced Clinton’s negatives to wavering voters at the end of the 2016 campaign. Laptopgate seems silly. No one outside Trumpland believes that Biden is corrupt, and these reported emails - even if bona fide - don’t implicate Joe in any wrongdoing. They are also - again if bona fide - the writings of a drug addict. What do families impacted by drug addiction know about addicts? They tend to lie a lot.
There is another aspect of fighting the last war here that should be noted. This is the first election in history in which a significant portion of the national electorate will vote in early or by mail. This means, for practical purposes, “election day” began two weeks ago and ends on November 3rd. Why is this important? Because it is too late for this October Surprise to work anyway. Over ten million people have already voted. If this was going to be useful, it should have been released in September. This might also be related to believing your own bullshit, but Trumpland knew for months that more people would be voting early this year than ever before. If it is designed to influence public opinion, then it is incompetent to schedule it when millions have already submitted their votes.
The Post story was very suspicious. They information was from Giuliani and a right wing blog. The Post did not even try to get a comment from the Biden camp. The repairman seems like a guy who knows he’s done something wrong. But, if Trumpland could push this out over social media none of that might matter. Except Twitter and Facebook flagged the story. Contrary to creating a “Streisand Effect” as many Trump supporters insisted on social media and in the Senate, it confirmed for many people what they suspected. The story is BS. The identical talking points across campaign, right wing press, and social media commenters makes clear this was a coordinated effort designed before the story was published. The reaction the campaign is getting from this might excite the base, but it’s not winning new support. I am not sure how many times this needs to be said, but Trump cannot win a two-way race with 43% of the national vote.**
And then, the perfect storm of incompetence from the campaign came in the form of a tweet from Trump campaign senior advisor Mercedes Schlapp. In an effort to insult Biden, she compared him to Mr. Rogers. Sure, you can say that that is not exactly what she said. But, in politics, if you are making that argument you’ve already lost. The reaction was swift and severe. Even the appearance of maligning Mr. Rogers is a bridge too far for most people. But that’s not the worst of it for Trumpland. In an effort to attack Biden and reinforce an imagined narrative that he’s corrupt, they inadvertently reinforced the actual narrative about Biden. That narrative is that he’s as empathetic as Mr. Rogers. They have only helped the former vice president with their “October Surprise.”
We know now that a lot of voters would really like the White House to become Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood after the past four years.
PROGRAM NOTE: This is obviously not the usual Friday polling review post. I may get one out today or over the weekend, but at the very least I will make sure that there will be a comprehensive polling update on Monday if nothing gets out earlier.
* Steve Bannon told a Dutch TV program a month ago that he had Hunter Biden’s hard drive from his laptop. According to the Daily Beast, a network run by Chinese fugitive Guo Wengui (Bannon’s business partner) was hyping damaging hard drives obtained by Chinese officials around the same time as Bannon’s Dutch interview.
** And even if it were somehow possible, it would be foolish to try it.