The 2020 election cycle has been full of twists and turns.
The president and first lady are positive for Covid-19 now in quarantine at the White House.
And President Trump announcing his Supreme Court pick, nominating federal judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The New York Times out with a new report detailing years of President Trump's tax returns. The article revealing a long list of struggling properties, write offs and hundreds of millions in debt.
Unexpected big news events have the potential to make or break a presidential campaign, at least during normal election cycles. President Donald Trump has a history of coming through these surprises unscathed, and 2020 has been anything but a normal year.
Here's what these 11th hour surprises could mean for the 2020 election.
There's a term we hear every election cycle. October surprises. October surprises. October surprise. October surprise.
October surprise, the idea is that something happens in October, late in a presidential campaign that changes the result in a big way, something unexpected.
2004, there was a tape from Osama bin Laden that came out at the end of the week before the election between John Kerry and George W. Bush on a Tuesday. Many people think that that changed the outcome reminded people of the danger of terrorism and the fact that George W. Bush had talked a lot about his eagerness to face that terror. And that was an election that was decided basically by 30,000 votes in Ohio.
There were plenty of late cycle headlines in 2016. About a month before Election Day, The Washington Post released the Access Hollywood tape showing President Trump bragging about making sexual advances on women in 2005.
Many Republican politicians had turned against Trump after the tapes were released. There were even reports that the Republican Party was considering replacing Trump on the ballot with Mike Pence.
Despite things looking grim for Trump, he managed to pull off an Electoral College win, becoming president even though he lost the popular vote.
And then most of all, late in October was the release of the letter by James Comey, the director of the FBI, suggesting that he was going to reopen his inquiry into Hillary Clinton's emails. There are very few people who do not think that in the absence of the Comey letter, that Hillary Clinton might not have been elected president.
American University Professor Allan Lichtman has accurately predicted the outcome of every election for the past 36 years using a list of what he calls the 13 keys.
The 13 keys are 13 true/false questions or an answer of false always goes against the White House party and if six or more of the keys are false, the White House party is a predicted loser.
Lichtman predicted a Trump victory in 2016, but he says the keys indicate Biden will win in 2020. He also says most October surprises don't change the outcome of the election.
The keys indicate that it is the big picture of incumbent strength and performance that determines the outcome of the election. In other words, the American people are very pragmatic and very rational, and they decide based on governing, not campaigning, whether or not the White House party deserves four more years.
In what seems like a repeat of 2016, Trump is coming up against several different October surprises this election cycle. The two big news events capturing the country's attention, where Trump's covid-19 diagnosis in early October and the controversy surrounding the confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice in the 11th hour of his first term.
We've never seen anything like this election with the pandemic, the economic crisis, the civil unrest. And on top of that story after story after story throughout October, each one of which would have been a major revelation and change the campaign in any previous year.
This year, though, we've seen three, four, five of those. It's an extraordinary political year.
A coronavirus diagnosis is terrible on its own, but for Trump, it could also interfere with chances at reelection. On October 2nd, 2020, the White House announced that Trump had tested positive for covid-19, despite the White House's announcements that Trump's condition was not serious.
He was transported to Walter Reed Hospital to receive treatment.
In the days and weeks following Trump's diagnosis. Many campaign personnel, White House staffers and Republican lawmakers who had been in close proximity with the president also tested positive. There were concerns surrounding how transparent the president and White House doctors were being about Trump's condition and treatment in 1956.
In the summer, Dwight Eisenhower was running for reelection that year, and he got an attack of something called eliteness, intestinal disease and very quick surgery. And this was really serious. And he had had a massive heart attack the year before. So Eisenhower had to show people that he was up to being president for another four years, although he was going to be the oldest president who had ever served at the age of 66. And so the way that Eisenhower dealt with that was unprecedented. He said to his doctors, tell the press everything you know, show them diagrams of my intestines, tell them all about the surgery, answer any question that they're given. And he was so transparent that when Eisenhower faced election that for this was not an issue. The model for modern presidents who are sick or have to get surgery is to release as much information as possible. And when they don't and President Trump has not and his doctors were very evasive. It ends up hurting the president concerned because people say it must really be a lot worse if they're not telling us all of the truth.
You know, the numbers have been pretty steady for Joe Biden over the course of months and months and months of polling. What we've seen here at the end is a slippage for the president that seems to coincide a little bit with his hospitalization. So the idea that the president himself was hospitalized for Covid at a time he's making the case that the country is rounding the corner on that virus. That does seem to be having an impact with voters. It does seem to be having some resonance with the idea that Joe Biden is making, that Donald Trump isn't the candidate to get us out of this virus problem.
That said, though, the president has powered through it. He's been out on the campaign trail. He's been holding huge rallies. He has been demonstrating physically that he can power through this. And he's trying to show that the American people can power through it as well. So we'll see which argument wins on the day.
Trump has been highly criticized for contradicting the CDC guidelines recommending all Americans wear masks in public. Just days before his diagnosis, Trump had criticized Biden for wearing a mask.
I don't wear masks like him. Every time you see him, he's got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from it.
He shows up with a big his mask I've ever seen, Biden suggested several days after Trump tested positive that Trump bore some responsibility for contracting the illness.
Anybody who contracted the virus by essentially saying masks don't matter, social distancing doesn't matter, I think is is responsible for what happens to them.
Polling shows that the president's diagnosis has had an effect on voters.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted immediately after Trump's diagnosis found that two thirds of registered voters felt that if Trump had taken the coronavirus more seriously, he probably wouldn't have been infected.
Another poll from Yahoo! News and YouGov found that 52 percent of registered voters didn't trust Trump to give accurate information about his health and his Covid-19 treatment. But take that with a grain of salt because Lichtman says polling doesn't factor into his prediction at all.
I look at the fundamentals that drive elections, not the day to day events and not the polls. Sometimes my predictions are in sync with the polls. Sometimes they are directly contrary to the polls.
While Lichtman doesn't think Trump's diagnosis will affect the race, he says the pandemic itself was a big hit against Trump's chances at reelection.
Trump's failure to respond to the pandemic and to the cries for social and racial justice cost him three keys the short term economically, because the pandemic had produced a recession, the long term economy key because it resulted in such negative growth and the social unrest because the cries for social and racial justice remained unresolved. And that guided my prediction, which I issued in early August of 2020, not in the waning months of the election.
In February 2016, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly. With roughly 10 months left before the election, President Barack Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
Republicans controlled the Senate in 2016, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to put Garland up for a vote, saying the next president should be the one to fill the seat. Despite Democrats pushing back, McConnell prevailed, and Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to the bench a few days after the 2017 inauguration.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18th, 2020, with 46 days left before the election. Democrats called for the nomination to be postponed until after Americans vote, arguing it followed the Republican's own precedent from 2016. The Republicans pushed back, saying that since the Senate and the White House are controlled by the same party, it was acceptable to push the nomination through before the election.
Let's be honest, in 2016, when there was a Democrat in the White House, if the Democrats had control the Senate, does anyone think they would not have confirmed Merrick Garland? Of course they would have. They told us.
There's two ways to look at this. One is that the president promised and delivered a conservative Supreme Court for conservative voters in 2016, and that's his argument for reelection with them in 2020: You reelect me, I'm going to continue to put conservatives on not only the Supreme Court, but courts up and down the federal judiciary.
That's an appealing argument for conservative voters. The flip side of that is, does the Amy Coney Barrett replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg anger liberals so much that it drives them out to the polls in even bigger numbers?
And is there a weird sort of complacency on the conservative side where conservatives say, 'hey, we got our conservative Supreme Court, we got everything out of President Trump that we were looking for, and so therefore, there's not as much reason now to go out to the polls for him.' Does it take away some of the edge for those conservatives at the same time? It sort of angers and riles up liberals. That's another thing that we're going to have to watch on Election Day.
It's possible that the Supreme Court appointment could have serious implications beyond swaying voters. Trump has said he wanted to fill the vacancy on the court before Election Day because he expects disputes over who won the election to be resolved by the Supreme Court.
But I think it's better if you go before the election because I think this is a scam that the Democrats are pulling. It's a scam. The scam will be before the United States Supreme Court.
There are a number of scenarios, and we saw this in Bush versus Gore in 2000, where a disputed election in the post-election period of time goes to the Supreme Court. And the president has said explicitly that he wants nine justices on the Supreme Court in case you do get a Supreme Court decision that impacts the result of 2020. The president pushing one more nominee onto that court.
Now, he has three people on the court who are beholden to him politically, but, of course, Supreme Court justices their life appointments. So the political calculation doesn't always work out the way presidents suggest that it will.
This president, though, wanted to avoid the specter of a potential 4-4 tie on the Supreme Court. Now with nine justices, it's likely that if the Supreme Court does weigh in, you're not going to see a tie. You're going to see a decisive decision one way or the other.
But the scenarios in which this goes to the Supreme Court are pretty limited. There are a lot of scenarios where this gets disputed down the line. Going all the way to the Supreme Court, though, would have to be a pretty rare case. So we're not looking at something that's a likely development at this point.
The 2020 race has seen an incredibly high volume of headlines that in any other election year would have taken over the conversation.
Another headline that hit in October, The New York Post published a controversial story claiming to show, "smoking gun emails" related to Biden and his son Hunter.
The allegation here is that Hunter Biden was engaged in foreign business opportunities and trying to get money from foreign governments and to benefit himself and his father.
Now, the Democrats have said there's no evidence that any of that is true. There's no evidence that Joe Biden certainly took any money as a result of any of Hunter Biden's business dealings.
The laptop itself was turned over by Rudy Giuliani, one of the president's closest political advisers to The New York Post. Giuliani has not turned that laptop over to NBC News, so the story can't be independently verified.
Nonetheless, the president has hope that this would sort of splash enough mud on the Biden family and the Biden campaign, that it would turn the tide of this election. It would cause people to stop trusting Joe Biden's judgment and start this sort of nagging doubt that Biden might just be in it for himself.
So far, that hasn't played out the way the president has wanted. His griped that the media won't cover the story to the degree he wants them to cover it. And we'll see if it moves any voters. There are a lot of Republicans who argue the president should be arguing about the economy and things that matter to voters and that this Hunter Biden laptop story isn't going to move a lot of voters ahead of Election Day.
Notably, there have been many news stories investigating the president's financial dealings. On September 27th, 2020, The New York Times released a trove of tax information about the president revealing he paid 750 dollars in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 and he paid no income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years.
One of the big mysteries about Donald Trump has been what's in his tax returns. The president's refused to release those documents as every major presidential candidate has done in the modern era. So the question is, does that move voters? What it probably does is solidifies the doubts about Donald Trump among those people who are already willing to be skeptical of him. And it probably doesn't move a lot of people who are pro-Trump into an anti-Trump camp. They've already decided that he's a successful businessman. They like that. And nothing that The New York Times says is likely to move those voters either.
On October 5th, 2020, the president's son, Eric Trump, was questioned under oath as part of New York State's investigation into the Trump organization's finances.
Separately, The Washington Post reported on October 12th, 2020 that the U.S. government has spent at least $238,000 for Trump's adult children and their families to stay at Trump properties.
The New York Times reported on October 20th, 2020 that the Trump Organization has a previously undisclosed Chinese bank account that the organization says it uses to pay taxes in China.
And The Washington Post reported on October 27th, 2020 that the U.S. government has paid the Trump Organization at least 2.5 million dollars since Trump took office for guest rooms, food and wine and other services at Trump properties.
Donald Trump is something unusual in American history, which is usually you have a George Washington or an Abraham Lincoln who will go to Americans and say, 'Please elect me president because you like my policies, but also because of the kind of person that I am. I will be a model that you can recommend to your sons and daughters and friends and other members of your family.'
Donald Trump never bothered with very much of that. He basically said, elect me if you like my policies. And as a result, when you see things that do not reflect very well on his character, many people have already factored that in and say that's not what I was looking for from Donald Trump.