A Bounty of Oct-Shocks

What came first, the October Surprise or Samhain trickery?

Pressing home one’s advantage in popularity contests has been a human tradition since Cain gave Abel a feldspar nose job. All the petty monkeyshines of All Hallows’ Eve, take a calendric backseat to the Greeks scandalizing the robed’n’sandled electorate with tawdry tales of their opponents getting lush on the vine, irrumating slave minors, bathing starkers in public fountains, and fornicating with other men’s wives. Oh, wait. That was a normal day’s capering for the degenerate Danaans. (Insert obligatory “Richard Nixon was right. About everything!”)

The home-stretch ratf*ck is a political tool as old as the Flood, God having unilaterally plucked one pious family to stay dry and alive over the rest. No doubt Noah’s neighbors were polling ahead in righteousness until heavenly word spread they were fornicating with the fauna, caning elders, and robbing each other blind like emaciated pygmies in a Port-au-Prince shantyhood. Public opinion soured thereafter. Noah and his motley crew secured arkian seats. The rest of the planet’s loinclothed population suffered an ignominy Hillary Clinton knows well: fatal exclusion.

Anno Domini 2026 portends no world-cleansing diluvium. But the upcoming midterm face-offs will be, we’re told by slant-jaw marionettes on CNN, “the most important election in your lifetime.” Just like how the prez-race two years ago was the most important. And the midterms before that. And the presidential bout before that. And every single demotab going back to when Know Nothing nominee Millard Fillmore won Maryland.

YouTube, the modern equivalent of the three-network boob tube, is overrun with political pitches, half of which sound like: “A vote for my opponent is a vote for castrating little boys, euthanizing grandma, mandatory heroin injections in schools, and a Pride parade in front of your house every day until ephebophilia is a protected fetish under the Civil Rights Act.” The other half run along the lines as: “Supporting Republican Steve Khakidork is the same as saluting Adolph Hitler himself. If we find you gave aid and comfort to an Orange Emperor feetwasher, you’ll never be able to hold a job again, own a mortgage, pay rent, or have custody of your children. You’ve been warned, fascist. Vote for democracy or get ready to fashion a newspaper-bed in the gutter.”

With stakes so existentially high, shenanigans were a cert. And lucky us, we’re treated to multiple October surprises, each more jiggering than the last. Hershey may not pump real milk chocolate into its confections anymore, but voters aren’t being deprived of sordid happenings before the big ballot day.

The first eye-popper occurred down in the Lone Star State, where a Garbage Pail Kid seminarian who thinks God is a tranny is giving a strabismic peculator a run for his nicked money. The race is so close that, halfway through the month, a cabal of rightie viralists gossed that Democrat James Talarico was committed to a funny farm. His long absence from the trail heated this tea. Yet the truth was worse: He was, by his own account and record, convalescing from the flu at his Austin home. Boring! And also proof of a frail constitution. Post-Wuhan plague, the country is no longer embarrassed to take a sick day.

The next headsmacker landed with pure martiality: an armed raid, complete with Kevlar-strapped g-men. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D – Mogadishu) was routed out of bed before sun-up by D.H.S. toughs and forensic analysts. Their objective? Prove the four-term congresswoman was granted citizenship in the last century under false pretenses. It’s long been a rightside joke/rumor that Omar tied the knot with her brother in a triple-bank-shot immigration ploy. The gaps in her asylee autobiography are indeed wide. So what’s a flailing President to do, other than hypostatize the runts and farts of members of the “Trump Truth Patriots” Facebook group? The sweet part: the investigation into Omar’s blurred origins began under the Obama Administration.

With all eyes on a Democratic incest, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate, leapt on the family-drama angle. Some skeevy consultant must’ve promised Tolstoyan bad blood makes good oppo fodder. His campaign released a grainy video featuring his opponent’s estranged mother croakily warning voters not to trust her loony offspring. Turns out, the loving madre let her second husband molest her daughter, before going on the lam. Close-kin perversity is not unheard of in the Rust Belt. But even the Scots-Irish of America’s abandoned heart have a code not to air such matters, unless for a “Jerry Springer” taping. The bolt from the red here wasn’t sleaze out of opioid-addled Midwest, but Ramaswamy peddling it like a cheap hot dog at a c-store.

The same day, leftie operatives dropped the mother of all bombs to really shake up a margin-close Senate race. The revelation, dozens of libtwits promised, would break the Richter-scandal-scale. The big reveal was…the gayest senator in Washington, D.C., was a genuine nance. Oh, and he happened to have hit the pine three months prior. Three rando L.L. Bean catalog models accused the late Lindsey Graham of paying them for carnal pleasure, tipping far below market rate, and curtly dismissing each of them after service rendered. This modest efficiency we’re supposed to fault him for? And South Carolina voters, who sent Graham back to Congress for three decades running, will clutch their pearls that the Southern bachelor they serially elected was light in the loafers? And they’re to take out their anger over being snookered on his sister running to fill his seat? The real stunner here was that lib muckrakers thought the same people who consistently gave their nod to a man who voraciously feasted on the bones of napalmed brown children would care that he was a lowdown Mary.

The final Oct-shock comes to us from the land of frozen marshmallow, America’s largest state that is home to more moose than man. In Alaska, where voters have to board a plane, hop a boat, and rent a husky-hauled sledge just to reach the closest Walmart/Post Office/poll location, Scantron skullduggery is afoot. Incumbent Republican senator Dan Sullivan is facing a bi-threat: Democrat challenger Mary Peltola and *dun dun dun* Dan Sullivan. That is, a doppelganger bearing the selfsame name. Thanks to the snow state’s abstruse rank-choice system, the Sullivan twin-list is bound to confuse balloteers. The real Sullivan campaign insists Peltola’s conniving underlings are behind recruiting a generic, ho-hum honky with the same nomina. To be fair, electoral chicanery isn’t out of the Dem ken. But Peltola insists on no foul play. The New York Times, in a rare bit of left-punching, revealed that party bigs did engineer the dos Sullivan ruse. The spook here isn’t so much that blue schemers would hire dummy candidates, but that they would hatch something so clever when their default opposition is to scream IMPEACH GRUMPF!!! over and over and over again and call it GOTV.

Are these enough boo shockeroos for you? If petty personality splashes don’t phase you, try hitting the gas pump and watching the integers tick up. The real October surprise voters may give a toss about is their dwindling savings accounts.