Past presidential candidates have introduced surprises late in their election campaigns, and this year could prove to be no exception. Polls show the contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is too close to call. It’s time for an October Surprise.
While I can’t predict which candidate will offer the first October Surprise, I’d like to see Donald Trump surprise us by ending his denunciations of San Francisco. Instead of calling the locale where Kamala Harris once worked a failed city, as if any crime or shortage of affordable housing here is her fault, Trump would offer space in his San Francisco office building—555 California Street—at no charge to asylum-seeking immigrants and others who need housing.
“If anyone can solve San Francisco’s problems, I’m the one,” he announces with his usual unlimited self-esteem, as he offered to convert empty offices into free housing. He would then exhort his rivals, other owners of vacant offices in San Francisco and other urban centers, to follow his example. “I know I’ve complained in the past about all the immigrants who vote, but now maybe they’ll vote for me.”
In response, Kamala Harris could announce her October Surprise, an executive order granting tens of thousands of asylum-seekers entry and work visas: “Those seeking emergency asylum here will be able to fill the agricultural, industrial and environmentally beneficial positions still open.”
“I borrowed some of this plan from the Green Party’s Jill Stein,” Harris continues, “I take good ideas wherever they come from. As in the past, new immigrants will increase the nation’s productivity, although our benefits from their work unfortunately come at the expense of those troubled Latin American, African and Mideastern nations whose economic crises and exodus of refugees Washington helped create through support of dictators and economic austerity programs.”
Harris adds: “It may surprise Senator Vance, but instead of immigrants taking housing away from others, through this program many of the newcomers will be building affordable housing with federal subsidies, and increasing our nation’s housing stock, while they temporarily live in the office space donated by Donald Trump and other landlords.”
These promises may not win Harris support from “the uncommitted,” those voters disturbed by events in the Mideast, so she will have to offer them a different October Surprise:
“Having read the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ inclusive, articulate call for a ceasefire in Gaza,” the Vice-President announces, “I am using their resolution’s language to promote ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon, wherever else the war spreads this week, and I also am calling for an end of American weapons shipment to the Mideast. Instead of arming combatants, we need to disarm with diplomacy. I’ll be in Qatar tomorrow to negotiate in person, offer those in need more humanitarian aid, and call for equal rights and an end of occupation for Palestinians as well as peace in Israel.”
When her opponents protest that Harris has no authority to enact these plans without Congressional approval, she will introduce her final October Surprise: “If you think my actions are illegal,” Harris declares, “take the case to the Supreme Court. I have vice-presidential immunity.”
Joel Schechter is the author of several books on satire.
