October Surprises and the 2020 Election

Not Another Politics Podcast – Episode 15

September 10, 2020

We’re heading into the homestretch of the 2020 election and, as October draws near, we want to take a research focused look at the famed “October Surprise.” It’s a political notion that says, if you want to damage a presidential candidate with a political bombshell you’ve discovered, you should wait until just before the election to release the accusations. But why should candidates wait? What do October Surprises reveal about the politics of scandal? And what can voters can infer from them?

A paper by Gabriele Gratton, a professor at The University of New South Wales in Australia, gives counter intuitive insights into when you should drop a bombshell if you want to cause the maximum amount of damage to your political opponent. We discuss how this research could change the way we view “October surprises” and the 2020 election.

The show is hosted by three professors at the Harris School of Public Policy: William Howell, Anthony Fowler and Wioletta Dziuda.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Transcript

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm Wioletta Dziuda.

Anthony Fowler:

I'm Anthony Fowler.

William Howell:

I'm Will Howell. And this is Not Another Politics Podcast. We have a presidential election coming up right around the corner. Anytime we have an election coming up right around the corner, we're always waiting to see if there's going to be any big juicy news, any gossip, any scandals that come out right before the election.

Tape:

We've been talking all morning about last night's revelation that George W. Bush was arrested for drunk driving back in 1976. With such a potential political bombshell this late in the race, how is Bush handling this?

Tape:

With just 10 days to go until the election, yet another controversy. On Friday, FBI director James Comey, sent a letter to select congressional leaders announcing that the criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server has been reopened.

Tape:

People talk about the October surprise.

Tape:

They call it an October surprise.

Tape:

The inevitable arrival of the October surprise.

Tape:

The October surprise, an event that alters the political climate often aiding one candidate while tripping up the other.

Anthony Fowler:

Then here we are in September. The October surprise could be right around the corner. With unprecedented numbers of people voting by mail and voting early this year, maybe we should actually be thinking about a September surprise. This is an idea that people have that maybe even there are people already who have some juicy details on Trump or Biden and they've been waiting until September, October to release it because that's when it's going to be the most impactful. I'd be curious to talk today about whether we have any interesting political science research that speaks to October surprises and whether they work and when they work and what we should expect.

William Howell:

Yeah. Wioletta, you talked to some people who've written down a model that tries to think through the incentives of people to release damaging information about a political opponent. Who did you talk to?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes. I spoke to Gabriele Gratton, who together with Richard Holden and Anton Kolotilin, authored a paper called When to Drop a Bombshell. In a nutshell, they considered the following scenario, suppose that presidential elections are coming and the current incumbent is running for reelection, and the walk for the opposition party and for those posts that you get a piece of information that's on the surface damaging to the incumbent. The question is, when should you reveal it? Should you reveal immediately or should you wait a little bit longer and perhaps reveal this piece of information just at the end of October, just before the election? If you believe that this piece of information is solid, that it's going to stand up to further scrutiny, then you should reveal it as quickly as possible.

On the other hand, if you think that there's something shady about this piece of information, that it looks damaging on the surface but under further scrutiny is probably going to fall apart, you should wait and reveal it only in the last few weeks before the election. What they find in the paper is that we are going to have a lot of information coming out just before the election because of the strategic considerations that the opposition party has, but most of this information that's going to come out is going to be off low quality, is going to be information that one can call fake. Given what we found, what voters should believe should they actually follow closely all these October surprises. Should they be surprised by October surprises or should they just ignore them and understand that most of them are just not very credible scandals?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Hello, Gabriele.

Gabriele:

Hi, Wioletta.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Great having you here. I have to start by saying that I really love the title of your paper.

Gabriele:

The title of my paper, When to Drop a Bombshell.

Wioletta Dziuda:

When to Drop a Bombshell. Can you start by telling us what you mean by a bombshell?

Gabriele:

A bombshell. Well, we were talking about a bombshell, like a journalist would talk about a bombshell. So for example, when you have a transcript of your president talking to another president and saying something that might sound like it's withholding aid in exchange for perhaps investigating the son of another potential candidate. That's a bombshell when that gets in the newspapers and on CNN.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Should I think about a bombshell as a piece of information that's damaging to a particular candidate?

Gabriele:

Well, it could be. In this case, it's damaging. It could be instead in favor of the candidate. But the key of a bombshell is that when the bombshell arrives, you don't learn immediately the truth but from that moment on, every newspaper is going to talk about it, every pundit is going to comment about it, every politician is going to comment about it. Maybe you're going to have an impeachment inquiry. Maybe you're going to have hearings on every day for 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM talking about this and slowly, you're going to make an opinion about it. You're going to learn whether it was true that the president was corrupt or not.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Suppose I get access to this transcript, when should I drop the bombshell?

Gabriele:

That's the point of the paper. It depends on what you believe about this transcript. While you're sitting there, you're taking this transcript, you are the whistleblower, you know that the actual meaning of the conversation was a quid pro quo. But then you know that slowly, this social conversation about this transcript will go to the direction of damaging the president. But then if you are an enemy of the president, you want to release this soon so that everybody would learn the truth, will learn that the president was—

Wioletta Dziuda:

Okay. So I want to release it as soon as I get it.

Gabriele:

In that case.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Okay.

Gabriele:

But suppose that it said that this was a benign conversation, it just may look bad. You're still an enemy of the president, so you would like to use it, but you know that if you let this bombshell boil in the public debate water for long enough, everybody will discover that, no, it was nothing. Maybe the Ukrainian president will say, no, you guys are crazy. No, that was perfectly okay. Everything is fine.

Wioletta Dziuda:

That's interesting. You're telling us that if we get some accusations, some scandal coming out far before elections, where it's not necessarily immediately consequential, this is probably going to be a true scandal, this is going to be probably true accusation. While if I have a "fake accusation", I'm putting this in the quotation marks, then I'm going to reveal it just before elections, just before some big event. You're telling me that as a voter, I should expect that accusations that are being cast just before big events are more likely to be false.

Gabriele:

That is exactly not only what we predict, but also what we find in the data about US presidential scandals. We're limiting ourselves to a president. In first term, we need a president that has been accused about a scandal, and we do that using data from Carter Onward. We do exactly observe this. In the sense, we observed that there is a peak of scandals in just the last few quarters, in particular the last quarter before the election.

Then, when we went and re-read the stories of these scandals by looking in the archive of The Washington post, New York Times, from the original first appearance of the scandal Onward, we've tried to trace, is this a scandal that if you had read all these newspapers for the next 15 years in the end, would you have believed it was a true scandal or a false scandal? We find exactly that the peak just before the election is driven completely by fake scandals that then later revealed to be fake. While the general distribution during the term of the president is driven by both true and fake scandals, but the fake ones are the ones that are concentrated at the end and that's why you have these peak scandals towards the end of the first term.

Wioletta Dziuda:

That's interesting. Do you see any trend over time? Do you see any changes in this pattern over time? Your result is related to how quickly people learn about whether an accusation is false or true. You would think that in the last few years, the technology has changed and we are learning things much faster. There are more newspaper outlets, there's Facebook people are posting, information coming out very quickly. Does your model predict anything related to what happens when the speed of learning increases and do we see any interesting patterns in the data related to that?

Gabriele:

This is a very interesting question. From an empirical point of view, we cannot do much using that sample but it's interesting what you're saying. In our model, if we can learn things faster than we would observe fewer scandals, because we wouldn't have the same amount of the true scandalous but fewer fake scandals, but I would like to point out two things. One is the technological change also increases the amount of information at all. In the sense that you get more scandals, maybe micro scandals, more information because you have more sources. Maybe we might end up hearing different versions of the same scandals from different sources because there are simply more sources around.

Wioletta Dziuda:

We have more people uncovering different—

Gabriele:

Exactly.

Wioletta Dziuda:

... It's harder to hide misbehavior.

Gabriele:

But also the other thing is, it's not completely clear to me, and I don't think it's clear to our colleagues in general. I don't know if you have an answer to this question. Does the social media model of learning, that we tell each other all this micro information, does it make us learn faster or it just keeps adding noise so that actually it's harder to learn? Even for people that do have access to all the newspapers, all the books, you got privileged position to study to go to great universities and so on. All this extra little messages that you're observing from your childhood friends and now we're posting things on Facebook, to me still, they instill a little bit of doubt every now and then. I say, "Whoa, what if this conspiracy theory guy has suffered?" Then you check it and you discover five minutes later that it was just a conspiracy theory. It makes absolutely no sense, but it makes you lose those five minutes. That's time—

Wioletta Dziuda:

During which you can now do your research or read the very—

Gabriele:

... Or learn the truth because you had deviated by—

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes.

Gabriele:

... Fact checking means less time checking the truth.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I take your point that it's not obvious that we're learning faster. But I would like to go back to your point about suppose we are learning faster, what does your theory predict? And you said, well, you would predict that we have fewer scandals, which as you say, we should not expect to see in reality because we also now learn about more misbehavior because we just have more resources to learn about it's harder to hide misbehavior. But wouldn't your model predict that the ratio of fake scandals to true scandals close to the election is actually now higher? Because right now I have this extra incentive if I'm sitting on the fake accusation, I have this extra incentive to... I still want to reveal it. I still want to get some boost in the support for my candidate and not the candidate of the opposition. I still want to repeat this fake accusation against the politician of the opposition, but I'm really afraid of revealing it earlier. I really want to do it in the last moment.

Gabriele:

If I bounce the fake scandals too much in one point, then it means that the voters would discount the moment so much that it's not worth risking it.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Okay. You're basically saying that I'm still going to wait a long time, but I might actually decide not to reveal it at all.

Gabriele:

My temptation is the one who wants to throw the fake bombshell is to say, well, let me try to bunch them up all at the last minute. But then, everybody knows that I'm bunching them up at the last minute. Last minute news are discounted completely and all I need to do is to do them just two minutes before.

Wioletta Dziuda:

It's interesting. What you're telling me is, suppose I have a fake accusation and I know that it's going to take at most one day for people to figure out, let's say at most five days, what I want to do is I want to release it at most four days before the election. But what happens is people will say, well, why is Wioletta releasing it five days before the election? It must be that actually, she didn't have any good scandal, any good accusation. She actually had only fake accusation and that's going to harm me. So I'm better off not to say anything.

Gabriele:

Exactly. In fact, if the best thing that the Democrats can get against Trump, which is his phone call with the Ukrainian president turns out not to be particularly bad, as a voter, what are you going to think about Trump? The Democrats have been trying to find something bad about Trump for four years and this is the worst they found.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Suppose there are two candidates and the candidate is widely perceived as unfit for office or there are some rumors that the candidate has misbehaved or has a long history of sexual misbehavior, and there's another candidate that, yes, there are some rumors of misusing private server, but in general, is perceived as having been in the public eye for a long time, having faced public scrutiny for a long so we expect a lower probability that there is a true accusation out there. What should we expect about the bombshells and the fake bombshells that are going to be dropped?

Gabriele:

Actually, it's not too simple because you have two effects going on here. Suppose that the expectation is that the candidate is very corrupt. From the point of view of somebody who wants to damage the candidate, if I have a fake news, I have quite little to gain from publishing this news because the president or the candidate is already perceived as very corrupt. I cannot damage this candidate much more than he or she already is damaged. On the other hand, since I know that my news is fake, there is a possibility that is going to be revealed as such and then it's going to make the candidate look a bit better because all—

Wioletta Dziuda:

Because if they really were corrupt, you would have had a true accusation.

Gabriele:

Exactly.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Okay.

Gabriele:

That's one direction. That's a strategic story that says, if the perception is that the candidate is more corrupt, then we should accept fewer scandals because those that are fake scandals would withhold them instead of publishing them. But on the other hand, if you're more likely to be corrupted, there's going to be a greater abundance of true stories about your corruption. That's another effect, which is purely mechanical.

Wioletta Dziuda:

That's actually very interesting. You're telling me that if we have two candidates, one is perceived as unfit for office and corrupt, this candidate is actually not going to be subject to too many fake scandals or at least the opposition doesn't have incentives to fake accusations if they're unable to find true accusations because of course those would be always preferred. But if we have a candidate who's doing well and who's perceived as clean, then there's a lot of incentive to create fake scandals so then, we should expect this candidate to be subject to more false accusations, which is, I think something that really puts in perspective all the accusations and all the claims of fake accusations that were made during the 2016 election campaign. This was a super interesting.

William Howell:

To frame out our discussion, I think we ought to think about three concerns. The first is, Wioletta, if you could lay out the logic of the model for us, so that we get some clarity about what's driving it. If we then can think about some alternative mechanisms, some alternative stories that one might tell that would generate similar kinds of predictions and how we might distinguish those claims from the model. Then third, we've got to turn to 2020 and say, what does all this mean for the run up to this election?

Anthony Fowler:

So, Wioletta, maybe you can help us understand the paper a little bit more. Most of the paper is a theoretical model. It's an abstract model that they got together and they wrote this paper where they're thinking purely theoretically about how an October surprise might work. Can you just walk us through the model and how it works?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Imagine that there's an incumbent president running for re-election and you're working for the opposition. Suppose you encounter some piece of information that on its surface looks damaging to the candidate? There's some woman that comes forward with allegations of sexual misconduct. What do you do if you look at this accusation and you see, wow, under scrutiny, it actually checks out? Once voters learn about the details of this accusation, they are going to believe in it and they are going to hold the incumbent responsible, then you want to release this information as quickly as possible because you want the media to dig in.

Wioletta Dziuda:

You want the media to search for witnesses, interview the witnesses. You want as much information as possible to come out so that the voters are really convinced this is a damaging scandal. This is damaging piece of information. But if you dig deeper and you see, well, this accusation falls apart under scrutiny, you don't want to reveal it too early. Because if you do that, media will dig deeper, they will interview the witnesses and they will conclude this actually doesn't checkout. That's a bad news for you because not only you didn't damage the candidate, but you also revealed that you didn't have any better scandal, any better accusation against the candidate.

What the paper does is the paper thinks about the scenario very carefully and they conclude that when people get a piece of information that they think checks out, they will reveal it as soon as they get this piece of information. But when they have something that they're suspicious of, they think it looks bad, but under further scrutiny it actually falls support, they have an incentive to wait until the very day before the election and revealed them so that people don't have time to learn that's actually not a true scandal. Are you with me?

William Howell:

I'm with you. Yeah.

Wioletta Dziuda:

All right. The interesting thing is that if you just think about this you would say, okay, if I see something sometime before elections, that must be true but if I see an accusation just the day before the election, that must be fake. But this cannot be so simple because if this was the behavior of the opposition, then people would know that everything that comes out the day before the election is fake. You can't really wait until the last day, you have to reveal this fake scandals, this fake accusations a little bit earlier, but you have this extra incentives to reveal them later than you would the true accusation. When I see the accusations coming out at the beginning of September or the end of August, I should be more inclined to believe that they are actually true. But when I see something being revealed, let's say in the second part of October, I should be suspicious. They might still be true because it might be that the opposition just encountered this piece of information, but they're more likely to be fake.

Anthony Fowler:

This is really interesting, I think, and maybe for formal modelers who spend a lot of time thinking about busy and learning, maybe some of these findings might feel obvious once they explain to you. But I don't think the implications of the model are obvious in the context of presidential elections. I suspect if you pulled an average American and said, suppose you did have juicy piece of dirt on Joe Biden and you really wanted to help Trump get re-elected in November, when would you release it? They might say, you should really hold onto it and you should release it in October when voters are likely to be making their decisions and it's likely to have the biggest impact.

William Howell:

Can you help us understand then, it's a week before the election, an accusation is made, then over the course of the next week, there's not enough time to actually verify it, and the voter knows it's possible, somebody truthfully just happened to stumble upon a real scandal. There all kinds of incentives that lead the people who have fake information to hold onto it and release it so that it isn't subject to this kind of scrutiny. Why should the voter update her beliefs?

Wioletta Dziuda:

I think that's a good question for these times that we are living in, in which it seems like it's so easy to fake any accusation.

Anthony Fowler:

Right. In the model, there is an accusation that's leveled, thereafter ensues a learning process and the learning in the model is one that it isn't that it is verified once and for all, but it converges towards the truth. I guess my question is it's a week before the election, I hear an accusation, why would the accusation have any negative impact on my assessments of the incumbent at all?

William Howell:

But there need not be a puzzle here. I don't know where you're getting at exactly, but it might be the case that voters essentially don't. It might be the case that October surprises don't work. In the model, October surprises essentially, they have a tiny effect on people's beliefs because like we talked about, it could be that there really was some bad scandal that only came to light in October of the presidential election year but the voter knows the odds of that are pretty low. It's probably not such a big scandal and so the effects are going to be small.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah

William Howell:

That's exactly my thought, is that if there are effects, they're likely to be small both because I'm more likely to expect fake scandals to occur in October. Then to the extent that any learning follows, it's going to lead me to be less likely to believe in the efficacy of the accusation and the veracity of the accusation.

Wioletta Dziuda:

To be fair within their model, any fake accusation is likely to have a small effect, whether it's occurs just before the election or very far away from the election. Suppose I make a fake acquisition far away from the election, at the moment when I make this accusation, people will think, well, it's probably true because it's far away from the accusation. I might get some temporary benefits from that, but it's far from the election. But because I make it so far from the election, it's extremely likely that voter will learn something by the time of the election. By the time the election rolls around, the effect of my fake accusation will be minuscule too. In their model, when I have fake accusation, whether I released it early or late, in expectation I get exactly the same bump at the election time.

William Howell:

But the true accusation that happens long before, which then the voter learns is in fact true, is likely to have a much larger effect. In that sense, the model suggests, no, we shouldn't worry so much about fake news. Yes, it's likely to happen. We're going to see these spikes and they might seem like perversities of the electoral system and pathologies of a democracy, but fear not, the voter is going to recognize the incentives of elected officials to hold on to fake news and they're going to account for that fact when they think about their own updating and whatever learning that follows is going to point them towards the truth.

Okay. Can we talk about alternative explanations for what might be in play here? Before one reads the model, we're likely to see a spike in scandals immediately before an election because either that's when people are more likely to pay attention to politics, which is not something that they account for changes in. You want to say it when people are tuned in and when they're tuned in is right before the election. That's when you put your information out and or that scandals have this kind of a dosage effect associated with scandals, that they have an impact on a campaign, but the impact only lasts for so long.

People are updating in the way that they characterize in the context of the model rather, there are these basic beliefs that one has about a candidate that you can perturb, you can disrupt, but then there's a reversion back to what those basic beliefs are. People just love Trump. They love Trump or they're going to hate Trump. Either way, you can nudge that for a week or two, but then there's going to be reversion back to what those prior beliefs are. If you're going to try to nudge it, you want to do it right around when the election is going to occur. Either way, those are very different notions about why you'd want to hold on to information until late into a campaign.

Anthony Fowler:

Certainly this idea is out there. There's a common idea in political science that voters are myopic. For whatever reason, the things that happen in the last couple months or even a couple of weeks are especially salient in voters’ minds. Anecdotally, you get how it feels that way. I mean, Donald Trump was impeached.

William Howell:

Yeah. Right.

Tape:

Historic votes in the house of representatives mean the shadow of impeachment is now hanging over the Trump presidency forever.

Anthony Fowler:

And yet nobody's talking about that right now.

William Howell:

Could it be? Might as well be a thousand years ago.

Tape [Donald Trump]:

It doesn't really feel like we're being impeached.

Anthony Fowler:

The Ukraine scandal is not even a thing that's on voters' minds anymore. There are so many more pressing things that we're thinking about right now when we're deciding who to vote for and so you understand why people feel that way. But on the other hand, there's not a ton of evidence that voters are in fact myopic, even though this idea is out there. The evidence that people typically point to is that the economy is a good predictor of election results and it seems to be, especially the election year economy, that's especially predictive of election results. So people say, "Aha! The voters are just thinking about whatever happened in the election year and not for the entire term." Which maybe that's right. Maybe the voters are myopic in that way.

But alternatively, maybe the election year economic growth is actually much more informative about the performance of the president than the first, second, third year economic growth because of course, it takes a little while for the president's policies to kick in and so on. Whatever I see in the last year is probably the most informative piece of information I have about are they actually doing a good job or their policies are actually panning out? Another thing that's worth pointing out is that it can still be the case that even if most voters aren't thinking about the Ukraine scandal, it has still affected their views about Donald Trump.

You might be a good Bayesian learner and you might be reading the news every week and be constantly updating your beliefs about Donald Trump. Is he competent? Is he not competent? Is he corrupt? Is he not? Is he representing the middle of the countries and extremist? Et cetera. You're constantly updating your beliefs. It's easy to remember how good of a job do I think Donald Trump is doing. You might forget all of those little signals you got along the way that you actually use to update your beliefs. The impeachment and the Ukraine scandal might have really shifted your beliefs about Trump, even though you're not everyday thinking about Ukraine. Anyway, that's just one argument that maybe the voters aren't so rational after all.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I feel like we should have some jingle that we play every time Antony defends the voter.

William Howell:

I know. It is true. Hooray voter. You're so smart. But I think it's a good point because I think what we're accustomed to doing in evaluating the significance of past events for electoral choice is to look at like exit polls wherein you say how important was this event or this occurrence for your vote and that people don't say, well, the impeachment was really important. It doesn't mean that the impeachment wasn't important because it may have led some people, it's probably a tiny number of people, but it may have led some people to nonetheless update their views about how corrupt or not Trump is. Even though they can't recall anything about the accusations per se, it nonetheless bore on their ultimate choice come election day.

Wioletta Dziuda:

One example where something interesting happened was the confirmation hearing about Brett Kavanaugh. At some point in time, Christine Ford came out with accusations of sexual misconduct.

Tape:

For the first time, Ford speaking publicly about an alleged assault more than 30 years ago. She says, Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark judge were there.

Tape [Christine Ford]:

Bret and Mark came into the bedroom and locked the door behind them.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Scrutiny started and the clock started ticking. We had some deadline, maybe it wasn't a firm deadline, but there was in people's mind deadline by which we have to decide whether Brett Kavanaugh would be confirmed or not. The scrutiny started and some accusations started coming out that Democrats actually had the testimony of Christine Ford long before they released it, long before they made a public accusation. In many people's mind, that actually diminished the value of these accusations.

Tape:

I'm really very disappointed in the way our Democratic colleagues withheld this information. I am very suspicious of how this came about.

Wioletta Dziuda:

It is interesting to know that the inference was the inference that the model, even though it's not formal in the model, the model would tell you should make that. If those people were sitting on this information for week two or three, probably they knew that it won't checkout under a lot of scrutiny so they wanted to reveal to us quickly before the confirmation vote as possible.

William Howell:

Should we try another one. What do we think about the Access Hollywood tape?

Tape:

From breaking news about Donald Trump, a decade old audio tape surfacing late today in which Trump is heard making crude and vulgar comments about women.

Anthony Fowler:

It's pretty late. It's an October surprise. It's on tape. It's pretty damning. Nobody denies the actual veracity of the recording itself.

Tape [Donald Trump]:

I'm automatically attracted to beautiful. I just like kissing them. It's like a magnet. I don't know, and when you were started, they let you do it.

Anthony Fowler:

But maybe there's some additional scrutiny is to, is this really a pattern of behavior or was this just a one off locker room talk thing that Trump wants to dismiss it as? What do we think is going on there? I don't remember what year the tape is from. Maybe some of you remember, but it was from, well, before 2016. Somebody had the tape available to them. They could have released it sooner. Why did they not, if you had to rationalize that? Not that we are endorsing the fact that if it was locker room talk, that somehow makes it okay.

William Howell:

Clearly not.

Anthony Fowler:

I mean, that's a stranger but anyway.

William Howell:

But you could see there's this background concern that I think is consistent with the model, which says that facts don't speak for themselves. They don't ever resolve anything. I mean, the accusation alone is insufficient. There needs to be subsequent learning in order to find out. In fact, was it just him boasting in a way that it was crass and crude and derogatory or was it the kind of thing that somebody who preys on women and sexually abuses them, is indicative of that kind of behavior? Although here again, I think this is a case where the way that the model characterizes learning, may deviate a whole lot from the way that learning happens in the political world. For them again, with the passage of time, you converge a little bit more towards the truth about the matter. But they're all kinds of reasons to believe that accusations of sexual impropriety and abuse are subject to all kinds of biases and distortions in the investigations that follow and that the passage of time does not in fact, necessarily lead towards greater clarity. Just the opposite in fact.

Wioletta Dziuda:

One thing worth pointing out, Trump was an unusual candidate. He turned out to be a candidate who seems to be immune in some sense to scandals. The model has nothing to say about that, I would say but I think—

Anthony Fowler:

But is incredibly unpopular. He's very unpopular but—

Wioletta Dziuda:

From the start, I would say—

Anthony Fowler:

... That's right.

Wioletta Dziuda:

... His ratings are pretty stable.

Anthony Fowler:

But the small core base of supporters that he has does not appear to be especially sensitive to new scandals about Trump.

William Howell:

Can we talk a little bit about what this then means for the coming six, eight weeks leading up to the 2020 election? What have you learned? I mean, one thing which I know to be true is that both parties are bracing for the October surprises of the opposition. Democrats are terrified that Trump is going to come out with I mean, something that he purports to be a cure for COVID three days before the election.

Tape [Donald Trump]:

We're going to have a vaccine very soon, maybe even before a very special day. You know what date I'm talking about?

Wioletta Dziuda:

My gut tells me that if Trump analysis a week before the election or two weeks before the election, that trouble of FDA analysis that they approved a vaccine for COVID that's going to have a huge impact just by the sheer power of this announcement when taken at face value. We have finally a solution to our problem. Two weeks is not going to be enough for the information to trickle in whether this is really effective and whether this has side effects.

Tape:

In a letter obtained by CBS news, a director of the CDC is calling on all States that have vaccine distribution sites could fully operational by November 1st. That of course is just two days before the general election and months before even the most optimistic timeline.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. I don't know whether you have any thoughts about that. My gut tells me that's going to be a big game changer, but why?

William Howell:

That would be a big deal.

Anthony Fowler:

I don't think it's going to be a big deal. In the world in which Trump just comes out and says, hey, there's a vaccine. I've cured COVID. I've solved the problem. Nobody will take that seriously. The model would say, of course, Trump is going to say that right before the election and that's not going to be credible. In the world in which the FDA comes out and says, we have a vaccine and we've approved it and we're ready to go. That's fantastic. I think we should all be hoping for that to come as soon as possible. There is obviously some maybe small chance that the FDA is highly politicized and whatnot, but I mean, I think I would give them a little bit more credit than that.

I also would want to give the voters a little bit more credit than that. If in fact a genuine vaccine is developed before November, I don't think there are going to be a lot of voters that credit Donald Trump for that achievement. I don't think they're going to be a lot of voters say, that was because Donald Trump was so committed and organized and passionate and devoted money and resources and whatnot. That the reason that we have the vaccine was because Donald Trump was president. If Obama or Bush or Carrie or Romney or McCain or any of these other potential people who have been president, we wouldn't have... I mean, that's crazy.

Wioletta Dziuda:

The jingle. Do you get the jingle in the background?

Anthony Fowler:

I don't think there's a single voter who would think that Donald Trump is increasing the chances that we get a vaccine or making it faster.

William Howell:

There are some. There are clearly some, but those people are already going to be voting for Trump anyway. They're already locked in. They will attribute all things good and great to this president just as there are some on the opposite side who will attribute all things awful and devastating to him.

Anthony Fowler:

Sure. Well, that's what they say publicly, but do they really believe it? I don't think.

William Howell:

This is an open question about how many. I think these people are—

Anthony Fowler:

Anybody who would believe that Trump accelerated the development of a legitimate vaccine that's probably somebody who would have already voted for Trump anyway, regardless of any other evidence. I don't think the swing voters are going to be persuaded by that to vote for Trump. That's hard to imagine. This is not to say that nothing could change people's minds. I mean, of course, if in fact there is hard evidence that Donald Trump himself went into the laboratory and had this genius breakthrough and discovered the vaccine, maybe that would actually change a lot of people's minds, but we're not going to find that out. Just like, if alternatively there really was a breakthrough vaccine but Donald Trump commanded everyone to keep it quiet and not release it for a few more months because he wanted the pandemic to go on a little bit longer. That would probably persuade some people to vote against Donald Trump. But I don't think we're going to get a revelation of that sort.

Wioletta Dziuda:

But I think you can put the story with vaccine within the framework of the paper. You can think, suppose Donald Trump made up his mind that he's going to approve or he's going to pressure the FDA to approve the vaccine before the election? But supposedly he made up his mind and now he just has to decide when to approve it. If you are just truly interested in the welfare of the society, if he thinks that this is going to be approved and no new evidence is going to sway him, he should approve it as quickly as possible. If he's super confident that actually that's a good decision, he should also do this as quickly as possible. If he's uncertain, actually, whether this decision is good for people, whether this vaccine is actually safe and effective, he has an incentive to do it close to the election as possible because he does not want people to start scrutinizing.

Anthony Fowler:

Does Donald Trump get to say whether or not the vaccine is... I don't understand what we're talking about.

Wioletta Dziuda:

He can can pressure the FDA. There are a lot of stories in the newspaper that the FDA is being pressured to—

Anthony Fowler:

Sure. I mean, can he be successful in that? He can try.

Wioletta Dziuda:

... I believe he can. I mean, given—

Anthony Fowler:

Maybe.

Wioletta Dziuda:

... The evidence that came out during this pandemics on how much federal agencies are being influenced by the central administration is pretty convincing, at least in my opinion.

Anthony Fowler:

I mean, maybe it's certainly possible the FDA is highly politicized and they're going to do whatever Trump asks them to do. I really hope that's not true. I guess that raises another interesting question for you guys. If you believe the FDA is highly politicized, then the question is if the FDA approves a vaccine right before the election, does that mean we shouldn't take that vaccine? Whereas the vaccine that's approved right before the election versus right after the election, do you think is much more likely to be an unsafe vaccine?

William Howell:

Yes. Right. I mean, to the extent that the model tells us. You have greater reason to believe the information is false if it's released right before an election. And what you're saying is this add on thing, which is that if you act upon the false information and start taking the pill that might actually do damage to you would do well to hold off. Just as you shouldn't give much credit to Trump when you actually cast your vote, you should also hold off and allow that medical intervention to be properly vetted.

Wioletta Dziuda:

It's interesting because in this example, you're appointing to a possibly huge negative implication of this October surprise. In the model, as we said, the October surprise does not have a lot of effects on the outcome of the election because people would discount this and they know that all the surprises are more likely to be fake than true. But in this case, once people conclude that this vaccine might not be working because this approval was just for political reasons, because they know that Trump had the incentive to push for this approval just before the election that said, that might actually doom the vaccine for a long time. People might be very reluctant to take it even after the election and then that might have really dire consequences for our fight with COVID.

Anthony Fowler:

There you go. There's a doomsday scenario for the day.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes. We always have to finish on a depressing note.

William Howell:

What's your bottom line on this paper?

Anthony Fowler:

I like the paper. I find the argument persuasive and I find the argument non-intuitive if I just think about the way we talk about scandals in October surprises in presidential elections. I thought the quantitative evidence, albeit limited, given that there are only so many elections and so many scandals, I found also somewhat persuasive and interesting as is suggested to me that we really should not take these scandals too seriously when they pop up right before the election and that voters probably don't.

William Howell:

Yeah, I'm struck by something similar here, which is that typically papers that are investigating phenomenon that aren't subject to sufficient scholarly inquiry and I think scandals is such an example. What they'll do is they'll say, this thing is more important than you thought. They actually breathe life into the phenomenon and underscore its importance. One thing that this paper does, they offer an explanation for basic trends that we observe in scandal revelation, but the significance of the very phenomenon they seek to explain rapidly disappears subject to the logic and scrutiny that they offer. You want to call up the Biden folk and say, don't worry, this is likely to happen, but it's not clear it's going to have a big impact.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. I completely agree with you. I think there's one additional aspect that we can add to this paper that nowadays it's much easier to fake a scandal, to fake an accusation. You don't need to catch the attention of CNN or Fox News, you just need to post it on Facebook. I think if we added this element to the paper, we would get that this effect of scandals not having a lot of impact in October, actually would multiply. Reasonable people will tend to discount whatever they hear a few days before election even more than they would have few years ago. That's good. That makes me want to make some popcorn for the next month and a half and just sit down and relax.

Anthony Fowler:

They say of course, it's not all normatively desirable. I mean, it does mean that if new information really does come out, that should influence our positions in October, it's hard to persuade people. It's hard to convince them that they should pay attention to that information because as you say, there's so many other fake things on Twitter and so on. It's not all a rosy story for democracy and for accountability and selection.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Political activists out there, if you have some piece of information that you know it's going to check out, release it ASAP. Do not wait until October. Great.