ABC News: ‘October Surprise’ could decide election.

ABC News has released a story suggesting that an “October surprise” will impact next month’s presidential election, with an incident involving Iran likely to decide the winner.

In an article entitled Obama Vs. Romney: Will October Bring a Political Surprise?, ABC’s Russell Goldman speculates that an Iranian attack on American interests could swing the election one way or the other, even suggesting that Mitt Romney may have “cut a deal” with Iran to undermine Obama.

“Were something to occur in the days before the election, it’s impossible to know how it might affect the voting,” he writes.

The fact that polls show Romney and Obama are so closely tied, “increases the likelihood that an unexpected event can shape the polls,” writes Goldman, pointing to the Iranian hostage crisis on the eve of the 1980 election which helped Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy Carter.

“You can term any unexpected event in late October or early November an ‘October surprise,’” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “The surprising thing is that we’re surprised by it every four years.”

As we covered at the time, the 2004 appearance of Osama Bin Laden in a videotaped message a few days before the presidential election.

Bin Laden’s intervention was so controversial and crucial that veteran newscaster Walter Kronkite told Larry King at the time that he thought the whole episode was a “set-up” orchestrated by Karl Rove.

Geopolitical analysts have speculated that the recent uproar over the anti-Muhammad film is a pre-cursor to an October surprise that will be exploited by neo-conservatives to “Carterize” President Obama and ensure Mitt Romney, a closer ally with Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu, is installed in his place.

It has even been suggested that Barack Obama may have an October surprise of his own ready and waiting, taking a cue from Bush’s 2004 success by preparing to release long-awaited photos showing the dead corpse of Osama Bin Laden.

In the days following the announcement that Bin Laden had been killed, Obama enjoyed a significant bounce in his approval ratings - jumping 9 percentage points almost overnight.

Given the amount of flak Obama has been receiving over his foreign policy failure in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, nothing is outside the realms of possibility.