Yeah I love Megan Trainor.
That music will never get old.
Man I can't wait to vote in the upcoming election.
Let's see what's happening in the news.
Washington now ground zero for the Ebola fear.
The Ebola crisis becoming a major election issue.
Candidates are scrambling to stake out positions.
But will the fallout tip the battle for congressional control?
Someone could get off a flight and seek treatment from a witch doctor.
What the fuuuuu—
I love Fight Song that'll never get old.
Man I can't wait for the upcoming election.
Let's see what's happening in the news.
New developments on a bombshell that could reshape the 2016 race.
New emails related to the Clinton email investigation.
Bombshell announcement has rocked the presidential
campaign.
Could not only make a difference in this presidential race but also the control of the Senate.
What the fuuuuuuuuuu—
There's no time for pop music, the republic's on fire, Brenda.
Man I can't wait to vote in the upcoming election.
Let's see what's in the —
Migrant caravan has captured the world's attention.
President has put the caravan on center stage.
It'll be a big part of the midterm election.
It's going to be an election of the caravan.
What the fu —
Wait a minute aren't they like a thousand miles away?
Why are we freaking out about this now?
Why does it always feel like some big sensational news story breaks right before it's time to
vo — oh my god.
I get it now.
Yes we are barely two weeks away from the midterms and Republicans are hitting hard
against the growing migrant caravan.
Now the question becomes will this sway voters in the midterms?
There is this concept in American politics called the October surprise.
And no it is not what drag queens do on Halloween.
October surprise refers to a big unexpected
event that gets tons of media coverage and sways people's votes right before an election.
In 2004 it was Osama bin Laden releasing a video threatening the US.
It was inevitable
that just before the election there would be some kind of a message from Osama bin Laden.
The video focused the media's attention on terrorism, which ended up benefiting Bush during the election.
In 2012, it was Hurricane Sandy, which gave Obama a chance to look like a leader and problem solver
right before his election against Mitt Romney.
We've got our October surprise now, looks like it's Hurricane Sandy.
Typically October surprise
describes something unexpected, but it can also be something more calculated. When political
operatives intentionally exploit and use stories to distract voters and do maximum damage to
their opponent.
During the 2014 midterm election,
it was Ebola.
We begin with the breaking news the deadly Ebola outbreak in Africa.
And tonight the first confirmed case here in America.
The story quickly became a Republican rallying cry.
Ladies and gentlemen we've got an Ebola outbreak, we need to seal the border and secure it.
We have Ebola.
We have to secure the border.
And news outlets follow their lead, running weeks of sensational wall-to-wall Ebola coverage.
Are there concerns of an outbreak in the US?
Should they be concerned?
Is the threat only going to grow?
The ISIS of biological agents.
Are we going overboard here?
This chart shows how much airtime cable news networks devoted
to Ebola.
Look at the spike right in the middle of October.
It's emerged already as the most watched news events as the entire Obama presidency began.
That coverage created a vicious cycle. The more news network talked about Ebola the more
politicians had to talk about it to seem relevant.
As one Republican strategist told NPR, it's almost impossible for candidates to break into this
news cycle unless they're talking about ISIS or Ebola.
It's a terrible thing to say, but fear is a heck of a motivator for voters.
Research conducted after the midterms found that, in the 34 states with Senate elections, higher
internet search volume for Ebola was associated with greater intention to vote for Republican candidates.
In 2016, the October surprise was Hillary Clinton's e-mail.
Take a shot.
Weeks before the election, FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress saying the
FBI had found new e-mails.
God damn it.
Pertinent to the investigation into Clinton's private server.
Trump is relishing Clinton's October surprise.
This is bigger than Watergate.
The party welcoming this new line of attack, as Republican candidates make their closing arguments
to voters.
And once again, every news network took the bait.
An October surprise unlike anything we have ever seen.
Trump has been lagging behind, could this change anything?
The story dominated the New York Times' front page for days.
The October surprise no one saw coming.
This chart shows how much Clinton coverage was scandal-related in the weeks leading
up to the election.
There's a huge spike right after Comey's letter is released.
We will find out soon whether any of those new emails contain classified information.
A few days later, Comey announced it had all been a big nothing burger.
The director clearing Hillary Clinton on those new emails.
But it was too late.
Look at Hillary's approval ratings in the weeks after that story broke.
Now, it's the migrant caravan.
After Trump began tweeting about a group of migrants traveling to the US in hopes of
seeking asylum,
Republicans turned the story into their closing campaign message.
The caravan is coming. Marching on our border.
Some say criminals among them.
You already know what happens next.
Immigration is taking center stage ahead of the midterm elections.
Trump's using the caravan as a critical midterm closing argument.
Front page after front page
in The New York Times, wall-to-wall coverage on every network.
Let's talk about the caravan.
Let's talk about this caravan.
Look at how many hours have been dedicated to the story on cable news in the past few weeks
alone.
Is this going to be a winning issue for your party?
I do think it's a winning issue and I think the president's handling it perfectly.
As one Trump official told The Daily Beast,
It doesn't matter if it's 100 percent accurate.
This is the play.
It seems to me that it's playing out remarkably well for the Republicans.
You didn't say e-mails. This one's for me.
These October surprises all follow the same formula.
The Ebola crisis, the email server issue, the caravan.
That is a sexy ass formula. It's drama it's narrative tension.
It's CNN's wet dream.
It's also complete bullshit.
These stories seem really important when they're happening but they're almost always PR stunts.
Look again at the coverage of Ebola in 2014.
Look at the drop off
once the election's over.
It's not like the problem suddenly got fixed after the election.
The number of Ebola cases in Liberia actually increased after November.
But nobody cared anymore.
The story had served its purpose.
The same is true for the Clinton... Bremail... story.
Close enough.
Months after Trump won the White House it's reported that he repeatedly uses an
unsecured phone line for personal communication.
Intelligence experts say he's definitely being listened to by Russia and China but the story
barely makes a blip on the radar, because it was never about national security.
It was about
winning an election.
And the same thing will happen with this migrant caravan story.
We know that because we've already been through this before.
Earlier this year Trump fearmongered about another migrant caravan traveling to the US.
The group was largely ignored until President Trump used them to highlight the immigration
debate.
The story sparked a major media firestorm for a few days.
Are you watching that mess with the caravan?
But then it faded from public debate.
Eventually the migrants arrived and quietly began going through the normal process to
apply for asylum.
All 228 people are being processed.
The legal process could take months even years.
We didn't hear about it because it wasn't election season yet.
This is a caravan that has been organized for years, they've been doing this for more
than five years.
And the evil genius of the October surprise is that it works even if
journalists realize it's a gimmick.
A lot of news networks have correctly noted that the migrant caravan
story is bullshit.
President has called it an assault on theU.S. border.
It is absolutely not.
It's nowhere near the US border.
But because Republicans can't stop talking about it,
neither can they.
This has become a key Republican rallying cry.
There are, quote, " criminals and unknown Middle Easterners."
Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners.
Criminals, and unknown Middle Easterners.
Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners mixed in with this caravan.
Strategy seems designed to scare voters by constantly repeating a false threat.
Yeah well it appears to
be working Brenda.
The point of the October Surprise isn't to warn voters about a real threat, it's to distract
them for long enough to get them to vote against their own interests.
One Trump official told CNN that the immigration push is clearly working because we're talking
about it and not health care.
Days before the caravan story blew up Mitch McConnell pledged that Republicans would try
to repeal Obamacare again if they survived the midterms.
Another report revealed that the Republican tax cuts have exploded the deficit which is
now the worst it's been in six years and Republicans plan to deal with that deficit by you guessed
it: cutting social programs.
There's been a bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes, Medicare, Social Security
and Medicaid.
Hopefully we'll get serious about this.
Those stories aren't sexy.
They don't have the drama of an October surprise, but they are stories that affect millions
of people's ability to survive in this country.
Stories about policy differences that actually matter on Election Day.
Trump is talking about this because he wants to distract from the fact that they want to
cut Medicare.
But this caravan is coming.
What's the Democratic Party's message about the caravan?
The truth is there's no great defense against the October Surprise strategy.
Our breaking news culture is super vulnerable to last minute bad faith publicity stunts.
But what you can do is ask who benefits
If I freak out about this?
And what are they trying to hide?