“I think the October surprise is more difficult today because of the hyperspeed world of communications we live in,” said Reagan biographer Craig Shirley. “There are so many competing avenues, there are so many competing social platforms and cable stations and blogs and websites and newspapers, so it’s very hard to herd everybody in one direction at the same time.”…
In many respects, the FBI email investigation was the perfect surprise. It arrived within a fortnight of the election, before the media narrative could shift, and came from a completely unexpected source: an Obama administration figure viewed as sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton and not its beneficiary, candidate Trump.
That may be the problem with this year’s bombshells: You could see them coming.
Nobody was particularly shocked to see the anti-Trump Mr. Woodward and The New York Times drop explosive stories about the president leading up to the election — it would have been more of a shock if they hadn’t — and the New York Post’s rightward tilt lessened the impact of the Hunter Biden email scoop.
