The Official October Surprise Tier List

Going over the most and least impactful eleventh-hour bombshells in recent history.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

U.S. elections have long had a knack for having their most impactful news cycles at their very end. Starting in 2020 and going backwards, you’d have to go several decades before finding a race that didn’t include an October Surprise: i.e., a big, unexpected, late-breaking major news story right before an election. Recent events in Lebanon strongly indicate that 2024 will be no exception, and even that new war likely won’t be the only last-minute trick the far right will attempt before Election Day.

So, in order to get a sense of how Netanyahu’s latest act of aggression may impact things, this article will rank all of the October Surprises in recent history, from the embarrassing flops to the world-changing pivot points.

F Tier

The 2018 Migrant Caravans

Across the past number of decades, October Surprises have taken many forms. They have included hacked emails and stolen laptops, natural disasters and sex scandals, sabotaged peace conferences and economic implosions. But at their core, they have always held their power in one major thing: their ability to confirm or rebut long-running narratives. With the right story and the right timing, they can single-handedly settle election-defining arguments right before voters go to the polls. In this, they provide hope for even the biggest underdogs at even the latest stages of a campaign.

It is for this same reason that a true October Surprise cannot be forced. Not only do they need to directly address what voters actually care about, but they need to be truly big and truly credible—not just something one side of the aisle is clearly pulling out of its ass as a desperation play. Essentially, it cannot be like the right’s eleventh-hour attempt at ginning up terror over the so-called “migrant caravans” right before the 2018 midterms, which backfired so drastically that it probably outright hurt them.

The sheer cynicism on display with this attempt was shocking enough. But what may even be more notable about it—and what didn’t receive nearly as much coverage at the time—was how remarkably out of touch it was. By 2018, pro-immigrant views had been reaching record highs. Even if Trump and FOX had managed to avoid being laughed off as pathetically desperate fearmongers and successfully increased the salience of immigration as an issue through this ploy, there’s no guarantee that it would have helped them. This failed attempt at a last-minute game-changer only succeeded in making it all the more difficult for the right to get people outside of their base to believe them on anything, ever.

2024 Equivalent: Trump making the pet-eating scandal his entire closing message.

Wait.

D Tier

The Hunter Biden Laptop Scandal of 2020