October Surprise

In American political jargon, an October surprise is a news event deliberately created or timed or sometimes occurring spontaneously to influence the outcome of an election, particularly one for the U.S. presidency. The reference to the month of October is because the date for national elections (as well as many state and local elections) is in early November. Therefore, events that take place in late October have greater potential to influence the decisions of prospective voters.

Since the 1972 presidential election (when it came into use), the term "October surprise" has been used preemptively during the campaign season by partisans of one side to discredit late-campaign news by the other side.

Walter Jenkins, a longtime top aide to Johnson, had a sex scandal reported weeks before the 1964 presidential election, when Jenkins was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct with another man in a public restroom in Washington, D.C.'s YMCA ("so notorious a gathering place of homosexuals that the District police had long since staked it out with peepholes for surveillance"). LBJ was largely saved by sudden events that pushed voters away from Goldwater and toward the stability hoped from continuity of government in a string of October surprises:

During the Vietnam War, the Republican challenger Richard Nixon anticipated announcement of a last-minute deal to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war by President Lyndon Johnson, which might earn incumbent Vice-President Hubert Humphrey enough votes to win election as President of the United States in the 1968 presidential election. Lyndon Johnson tried to salvage the election for his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, with the claim of a peace breakthrough in the Vietnam talks a few days before the election. LBJ announced an enhanced bombing halt and more intensive talks in which the Viet Cong and the Saigon government would be "free to participate". After President Johnson announced a halt of the bombing of North Vietnam on October 30, 1968, Humphrey surged ahead of Nixon in some polls, where days before they had been in a dead heat.

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