I bet the October surprise is that no one cares.
But this is getting tiresome. The talk about this has been going on for months now. And now it's October and the only thing we've got is that something's going to be released.
They're going to lose any interest very quickly because of this unless it's truly damning material.
Hmm... depending on your point of view, I guess either of those options could apply to either candidate. We've become way too polarised.
Adjusting your values and convictions is seen as a flaw, so in a sense we have disincentives evolving of thoughts.
[0] http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/g...
Journalists and anti-censorship activists who I am in touch with in Turkey have been combing through the leaked documents, and I am not aware of anything “newsworthy” being uncovered. According to the collective searching capacity of long-term activists and journalists in Turkey, none of the “Erdogan emails” appear to be emails actually from Erdogan or his inner circle. Nobody seems to be able to find a smoking gun exposing people in positions of power and responsibility. This doesn’t rule out something eventually emerging, but there have been several days of extensive searching.
However, WikiLeaks also posted links on social media to its millions of followers via multiple channels to a set of leaked massive databases containing sensitive and private information of millions of ordinary people, including a special database of almost all adult women in Turkey.
Yes — this “leak” actually contains spreadsheets of private, sensitive information of what appears to be every female voter in 79 out of 81 provinces in Turkey, including their home addresses and other private information, sometimes including their cellphone numbers.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdog...
Plus the DNC leak created a strong impression in many peoples' minds that it was a deliberate attempt by a foreign power (guess who...) to try to tip the US election to the candidate they favored (hint: name rhymes with "Ronald Rump"). So there's some irony if WikiLeaks is now going to publish allegations of someone else influencing the election.
The remarkable thing about this is that, almost universally, the media organisations who claim this condemns Wikileaks support the person who actually uploaded all that personal information and gave everyone the link, claiming it was something else. Some of them, like Wired, have even argued he did absolutely nothing wrong. It's almost like no-one actually cares about that sensitive information being exposed to the world, just attacking Wikileaks.
WL... not so much with the regrets. That can make a big difference in how people react; "I realize I did a bad thing and now feel bad about it" gets sympathy while doubling down doesn't.