October Surprises are the well-known (and more often left-wing) tactics.

Recall the shocking last-minute revelation, five days before the 2000 election, that candidate George W. Bush had been charged with drunk driving more than a quarter-century earlier. This surprise may have cost President Bush the popular vote that year.

In some cases, incumbents can use their power to skew elections. President Joe Biden benefited from left-wing activists leaking the Supreme Court's impending overturn of Roe v. Wade before the 2022 midterm elections.

As the actual vote approached, Biden called for canceling hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans owed to the federal government. He also began depleting the Strategic Oil Reserve (also in this election year) to bring down gas prices. It is no wonder that the anticipated midterm red wave of the Republican Party ended up being a small ripple.

October surprises are often more humane, unleashed based on previously undisclosed failures of rival candidates.

At the end of the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton's team leaked news that she had purchased the fake “Steele Dossier” purportedly evidence of “collusion” between Trump and Russia.

On the eve of the final presidential debate of 2020, Biden tasked current Secretary of State Antony Blinken with working with former CIA interim director Mike Morell to round up “51 former intelligence officials.” They were to lie that Hunter Biden's incriminating laptop was likely the product of a Russian intelligence “disinformation” operation.

The ploy worked, turning potential evidence of corruption in the Biden family into a repeat of the 2016 Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

This time, the Harris campaign clearly couldn't wait until October or early November to create a surprise.

Perhaps the Harris campaign's impatience stems from sweeping changes to state voting laws inspired by Democrats.

Recall that in 2020, under the cover of COVID-19, Democratic legal teams changed state laws in key states to institutionalize early voting and voting by mail. These changes turned a once-symbolic Election Day into a mere construct in which only 30 percent of eligible voters cast their votes.

So what used to be October shocks (both embarrassing revelations and the use of incumbency to skew elections) is now becoming an earlier and more frequent preemptive “September shock.”

Suddenly, just 50 days before the election, the Federal Reserve decided that interest rates, which had soared in response to the hyperinflation of the Biden-Harris era, now needed to be lowered. This is as supposed proof that the Biden-Harris inflation is already over and inflation is over. The economy needs to be rapidly revitalized.

Just as suddenly, on September 23, just 43 days before Election Day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was flown into the US by the Biden-Harris administration at the US government's expense.

Even more surprisingly, President Zelenskiy visited Pennsylvania, a battleground state where most observers believe the currently deadlocked election will be decided.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Zelenskiy immediately toured a military factory in Pennsylvania that produced shells likely to be sent to Ukraine as voters there worry about job losses.

The Harris-Biden administration was sending a not-so-subtle message that giving billions of dollars in arms to Zelenskiy's Ukraine would lead to jobs for Pennsylvania voters.

But that wasn't the only terrible surprise in September.

In an interview with a pro-Biden Harris leftist new yorker According to the magazine, Zelenskiy has plunged headlong into the current close presidential race. She accused Harris' rival, former President Donald Trump, of being someone who “even if he thinks he knows how to stop wars, he actually doesn't.”

Unsatisfied with this accusation, Ukraine's president went even further in slamming President Trump's running mate and running mate, J.D. Vance, calling him “dangerous” and “too extreme.”

The left is still talking nonstop about the non-existent 2016 Trump-Russia “collusion” and the equally bogus 2020 Trump-Russia “disinformation.”

However, it would be difficult to define “election interference” more clearly than Zelenskiy's surprise this time.

After all, a sitting vice president running for president once flew aboard a U.S. military jet carrying foreign leaders to key U.S. states likely to decide the impending election. Is it okay?

And others paraded him around an arms export factory in the state while he slammed two opponents of current Vice President Kamala Harris, calling them “dangerous” and “extremist.” Maybe?

And why was Zelenskiy's visit to Pennsylvania arranged by the Biden-Harris administration to coincide with the traditional start of mail-in and early voting?

But was Mr. Zelensky's sudden intervention in Pennsylvania and his shoddy domestic politics and bashing of Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance so wise?

After all, Harris's opponent, Trump, had just survived an assassination attempt by a pro-Ukrainian gunman — as Trump prioritized a negotiated settlement to a war that lasted 30 months and left 1 million casualties. Was he furious at what he was accused of doing?

Taken all together, September surprises can backfire and appear to voters as crass and insulting, rather than just cynical.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of Basic Books' The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. You can get in touch by sending an email to authorvdh@gmail.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.