Aloha, sugeng sonten, and welcome to another edition of The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic. Though the vice-presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz took place just five days ago, memories of it are fading so fast that the funniest part of last night’s SNL cold open—when Bowen Yang as Vance and Jim Gaffigan as Walz became so caught up in their performative niceties that they found themselves besotted, gazing longingly into each other’s eyes as Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” kicked in—is almost certainly destined to be incomprehensible not just to future generations finding the clip but to us a year from now.

But as lame as it was, the Vance-Walz debate was also a reassuringly familiar ritual: a fulcrum on which an otherwise unmoored campaign and its coverage could temporarily pivot; a pit stop on the road to Election Day that’s forgettable but also indispensable to an edgy, anxious electorate desperate for a fixed point on the map where they can get a bite and take a piss.

But now that the V.P. debate is in the rearview mirror, what we see when we look down that road is disorienting in the extreme: a four-week homestretch without a single tentpole event firmly (or even tentatively) fixed on the campaign calendar. Even in normal election years with vastly smaller stakes, this monthlong expanse of barren real estate would intensify the focus on a topic that invariably generates ferocious interest and feverish speculation: What October surprises are scattered around out there like political I.E.D.s, their tripwires taut or their timers ticking, destined to impact the race in dramatic and unpredictable ways?

2024 is by no means a normal election, of course—and the combination of its existential stakes and the prospect of an unstructured, anarchic final month of the campaign (among other things) has the Harris and Trump campaigns, the broader political class, and the national media scanning the horizon for potential October surprises to an unprecedented degree. And that, dear readers, is the subject of tonight’s column.

🎧 Essential listening: Last week, on the Wednesday episode of Impolitic With John Heilemann, the Puck superfriends—my partners Dylan Byers and Peter Hamby, plus yours truly—reunited again for a late-night dissection of the Vance-Walz debate that was as sharp, savvy, and as fun to be a part of as the two epic post-debate episodes that had preceded it. You can find it here.

Then, on Friday’s episode, we were graced with the presence of the one and only Lawrence O’Donnell, host of The Last Word on MSNBC, for a rich discussion of the newly unsealed, headline-making, deeply damning brief filed by special counsel Jack Smith in the January 6 federal case against Donald Trump. Lawrence, who has been a close student of Kamala Harris from way back and whose time as a staffer for Daniel Patrick Moynihan gives him unique insight into the Senate, coughed up pearl after pearl of wisdom on Harris, the future of the upper chamber in the post-Mitch McConnell era, and more. You can find that one right here.

And now to the main event…

Of course, as every politically sentient being is all too painfully aware, any semblance of what once constituted normalcy in both Republican politics and the national media has been systematically dismantled since Trump stepped onto the national political stage in 2015. Nine years later, Vance’s lunacy was briefly decried in the predictable quarters, but will leave no lasting impact on the presidential race. Nor will it put the slightest dent in his future in G.O.P. politics; in truth, it might enhance his prospects. The vice presidential debate broke through enough to merit being spoofed last night on Saturday Night Live, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that we won’t be seeing a whole lot more of Bowen Yang’s Vance or Jim Gaffigan’s Tim Walz between now and Election Day (a shame, since Gaffigan in particular is very good). In the Beltway-based media outlets, the central takeaway from the debate was astonishment at how cordial and substantive the evening was. Both The Washington Post and Roll Call ran headlines deeming the civility of Vance and Walz an “October surprise.”

The phenomenon of the October surprise—a late-breaking, game-changing piece of bombshell news that comes out of nowhere and reshuffles the deck, dominating headlines, scrambling prevailing narratives, altering existing trajectories—has become a quadrennial ritual. Nevertheless, in just the first six days of the month, we’ve already flirted with a half-dozen unexpected developments, if not the sort of electorally consequential shocks, that might constitute an October surprise: the longshoremen’s strike, which got resolved; Hurricane Helene, which has decimated the western part of North Carolina, a critical swing state; special counsel Jack Smith unsealing a new filing in the January 6 case, which lays out in grisly detail Trump’s plot to steal the presidency; Israel invading Lebanon, Iran launching missiles into Israel, and the growing fears of a wider war; and new jobs numbers, which further suggest that Joe Biden might actually have secured a soft landing for the economy.

Yet most of these news cycles paled in comparison to the genuinely tectonic, truly shocking events of the summer: Biden’s disastrous debate performance; Trump being shot in the ear by a would-be assassin; Biden’s decision to drop out of the race; and Kamala Harris’s nearly instantaneous ascension as his replacement. (There was, of course, another botched Trump assassination attempt in there, too.)

One result of this utterly unimaginable, genuinely bonkers chain of events is that both the Harris and Trump campaigns, the press, and voters are already hyper-attuned to the outlandish craziness of this election year and have been conditioned, in a way, to consider stunning, unprecedented turns of events par for the course in 2024. Against the backdrop of what’s already happened in the presidential race, an October without an October surprise—or several October surprises—would be the only real surprise. Thus both campaigns are buckled down, carefully planning rallies, media interviews, grinding it out with their ground games, each seemingly of the belief that they’re in the lead, not wanting to rock the boat. But, at the same time, everyone is on high alert, eyes peeled for the appearance of black swans, flash hurricanes, or other signs of ominous glitches in the matrix.

The operative class surrounding Trump and Harris recognize the historic closeness of the race. One theory is that anything that moves the numbers even a little bit could be decisive. There’s also a countervailing theory that, after all of the giant surprises that have already occurred, the race is fundamentally static—that we are essentially back to where we were with Biden and Trump in January of 2024, and nothing short of a Martian invasion could meaningfully move numbers in the race (with the direction of that movement dependent on whether the Biden-Harris tandem was successful in sending the little green men back from whence they came).

The campaigns, meanwhile, are proceeding from two assumptions. The first is that Harris, far less well-known and firmly defined than Trump, is more vulnerable to a last-minute revelation of some sort. And the second, also shared by both sides, is that, based on both current and historical evidence, Trump is more or less impervious to any remotely imaginable October surprise. To wit: Within the space of a few months, a jury of his peers turned Trump into the first ex-president ever convicted on criminal charges, and a murderous lone gunman took a shot at him, drawing blood. In each case, the effect on Trump’s standing in the polls was roughly the same: one point down following the former event, one point up following the latter. Trump’s ceiling and floor are set in concrete—essentially immune to new facts on the ground, no matter how dramatic or shocking.

Election Day came and went with no such deal, sealing Carter’s fate. But shortly after Reagan took office, Iran agreed to release the hostages—sparking multiple conspiracy theories that Reagan’s team had done what it accused Carter’s team of attempting to do, but in reverse—bargaining with the Iranians to not release the 52 Americans it had in captivity until after the election. This theory was investigated for years and ostensibly debunked by two congressional committees. But then last year, Ben Barnes, an aide to the former Texas governor and Regan advisor John Connally, told Peter Baker at the Times that yes, it was true—Connally and Barnes had flown around the Middle East throughout the summer of 1980, doing exactly what the conspiracy theories had conjectured. Barnes brought receipts from contemporaneous sources to Baker.

So, interestingly, the concept of the October surprise entered the political vernacular on account of an October surprise that didn’t actually happen. But from there, we’ve ended up where we are now, with a promiscuous overuse of the phrase, often to describe any reasonably sized, unexpected, campaign-related piece of breaking news that takes place in October—regardless of whether it has any real effect whatsoever on the outcome of the election in question. Former secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger’s indictment over the Iran Contra scandal just before the 1992 election is often cited as an October surprise, for instance. But no serious person involved in George Herbert Walker Bush’s campaign, including 41 himself, was deluded enough to believe that Weinberger’s indictment had anything to do with him losing to Bill Clinton.

But not all October surprise theories are that thin. In 2004, Al Jazeera posted the Osama bin Laden video trashing George W. Bush very close to the election. If you look at the data, the video didn’t seem to impact the polls very much. Both W. himself and John Kerry campaign advisor Bob Shrum, however, cited that video as being helpful in the last couple of days of the election. Dan Pfeiffer, who also worked on the Kerry campaign, told me that it didn’t show up in the polls, but in terms of what the country was focused on in the final days ahead of the election, the Bin Laden video foregrounded the issue Bush wanted the election to be about—pushing everything else out of the frame, including the Iraq War and a bunch of domestic issues that favored Kerry.

Larger surprises took place in both Obama elections. The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the financial crisis in 2008 was a September development that was so big, it washed all the way through October and right up to Election Day. People forget that John McCain had taken the lead in the polls in early September, weeks after he put Sarah Palin on the ticket and she’d given her boffo speech at the G.O.P. convention. Then Lehman collapsed in mid-September and the world teetered on the precipice of financial armageddon, unleashing a cascading series of events that presented both candidates with a real-time test of leadership that Obama passed and McCain did not—starting with his infamous declaration that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” And that was all she wrote; Obama never looked back, and his poll numbers marched steadily toward the landslide he secured on Election Night.

Four years later, Obama benefited from two other late-stage surprises: the release of a secret recording of Mitt Romney speaking to a group of Republican donors earlier that year and disparaging the “47 percent” of Americans he believed weren’t paying their fair share of taxes—and who were therefore undeserving of Romney’s attention if he were elected president. (The recording first became public in September, but it dominated media coverage and the Obama campaign’s negative ads in October.) Romney’s advisors prefer to think that a later-breaking, bona fide, force majeure October surprise—Hurricane Sandy, the coverage of which featured Romney ally Chris Christie repeatedly enveloping Obama in big bear hugs for days on end—was what tilted the election in Obama’s favor. David Plouffe and the rest of the Obama 2012 high command roll their eyes at that; their data showed Obama had the race won before either Sandy or Christie entered the picture.

But the October surprises of the Obama elections pale in significance beside the pair of bombshells that rocked the 2016 election in its final month. First came the Access Hollywood tape, featuring Trump’s infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” braggadocio about his penchant for sexual assault—audio that, when The Washington Post first broke the story, was widely (but wrongly) seen as being unsurvivable for him. The second was the equally infamous letter released by F.B.I. Director James Comey related to the long-running controversy around Hillary Clinton’s private email server—the impact of which is generally seen, among campaign insiders and data nerds alike, as doing more to cost Clinton the election than any other discrete factor. Why the Comey letter did more to damage Clinton than the Access Hollywood tape did to damage Trump is a topic for another day (and a lot more space than I have at my disposal here). But Trump’s survival of his first October surprise is among the most vivid signs of the impenetrability of his political hide.

Issues that could hurt her would have to be more direct, and more personal. While I’m personally unaware of any information suggesting skeletons rattling around in Harris’s closet, a revelation that’s either personal or policy-centered, especially if it’s buttressed with audio or video, could impact her more significantly than a similar revelation would Trump. “I anticipate something will happen in October, as it always does,” Hillary Clinton told Firing Line’s Margaret Hoover. “There will be concerted efforts to distort and pervert Kamala Harris, who she is, what she stands for, what she’s done. … I don’t know what it’s going to be. But it will be something, and we’ll have to work very, very hard to make sure that it is exposed as the lie that it is.”

One thing Harris is surely worried about are A.I. deepfakes, whether created by a foreign adversary or domestic operatives, of Harris making a damaging comment—or a multitude of contradictory comments that would cause mass confusion about where she stands, what her beliefs are, what’s real and what isn’t—a cyber October surprise. (For an example of what she has to worry about, take a look at Jake Tapper’s viral deepfake Jake.) As my partner Julia Ioffe noted earlier this week, these efforts have already begun, and are ongoing. Iranian agents hacked the Trump campaign earlier this summer, of course, although the information they extracted—such as the campaign’s own oppo file on Vance—has had zero impact on the race.

Finally, there’s the October surprise that would be least surprising but potentially have the greatest impact on the race: Trump agreeing to debate Harris again, as she has offered to do, under the auspices of CNN on October 23. Given the totality of Harris’s decimation of Trump in round one, the safe bet here would be on a repeat shellacking. But what if somehow Trump managed to control himself, maintain his composure, speak rationally, make disciplined arguments—and, you know, not behave like an asshole from start to finish?

Okay, okay, I hear you cackling, but grant me this: If somehow Trump managed all of that, it would be an October surprise for the ages—and just inconceivable enough to measure up to the standard set by the rest of 2024.