Countdown to the Last-Ever October Surprise

Countdown to the Last-Ever October Surprise

It’s election season. It’s October. According to the political-astrological calendar, this is very important: It’s time for an October surprise. Juan Williams thinks the surprise will be war:

To be clear, Republicans remain a slight favorite to win enough seats to claim the majority of the U.S. Senate. But the twists and turns of war have the capacity to create one legendary October political surprise.

He is using the conspiratorial definition of “October Surprise,” as opposed to the literal surprise definition. War for votes. Bob Beckel, conspiracy theorist, agrees: “I think I know what it is, but it is going to shake things up…it’s going to have to do with national security.”

Darrell West has a different idea:

[T]he real October surprise will come from billionaires dropping millions of dollars in a handful of Senate races seeking to move the needle one or two points to secure the election.

That would throw things off! But you could argue that this wouldn’t really be a surprise.

Yesterday, anyway, Washington achieved clarity. The official October Surprise is Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. (Congratulations to Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever.)

Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post:

Add it all up and you are left with this conclusion: Ebola is the October surprise of the 2014 midterms. That is, an unexpected event that has the potential to roil the electorate in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

Elise Viebeck at The Hill concurs:

Ebola has become the October surprise of this year’s midterm elections, with Democrats and Republicans doing battle over everything from restrictions on travel to the disposal of a victim’s remains.

It says something rotten that the consensus predictions for an October surprise were partisan assumptions that one party or the other would effectively rig the election; it says something else, something more sad than sinister, that, according to pre-eminent take-havers and score-callers, the actual October surprise is an out-of-control disease with no consciousness or ideology, a disease that has killed thousands of people and will kill thousands more.

Imagine being unable to read about Ebola without thinking “is this, finally, the October Surprise?” Imagine watching a meteor flame through the atmosphere and thinking, “this is going to be very, very inconvenient for incumbents.”

Image from Wikimedia Commons