Tim Walz's surprise in October isn't a shock – but it will rattle the swing states

Poll results in the seven states that will change vote counts next month are razor thin.

And as if on cue, a narrative story emerges that may or may not be true, but shows us how little swing state voters know about the man who could have the ultimate closeness to the presidency.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz reportedly had a major secret romance with the daughter of a Chinese communist official.

About a week before the election, Jenna Wang made the explosive claim that she and the Democrat had had a passionate liaison that began with lovemaking in 1989 to the sounds of George Michael's “Careless Whisper,” only to end in long-distance conversations about it The marriage and Wang's move to America ended in mutual recrimination.

Timing is everything in a story like this, and this is the classic October surprise, a trick-or-treater that leaves us wondering how, after Walz's many years in politics, this crucial piece of evidence comes together.

Imagine: “Coach” traveled to China a few months after the brutal subjugation of martyrs for freedom in Tiananmen Square, which led to mass arrests, a media crackdown and protests, and the end of a perestroika period in Beijing .

And he is supposedly recruiting and inspiring someone who was born into party loyalty.

She says Walz forced her to sleep in his compartment on the train. If you believe her, they wrote to each other for years before it became clear when he returned in 1992 that they would not get married.

What does this mean, if anything?

Does this mean that Walz was being cultivated by someone who could very easily be an agent of foreign influence and who had blackmail material stored until a time when he could use it?

Surely many of us have ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends. But how often are they able to provide narratively plausible cases about secret relationships with communists, a “passionate” love affair that Wang says left her desperate and feeling like a “prostitute”?

Or was he just a young man?

Whatever the ultimate answer, the song remains the same and has a bitter edge.

It's just the latest waltz not working, like when he got caught in a lie during the JD-Vance debate. Old “Knucklehead” was wrong about where he was during the aforementioned 1989 massacre.

But it's okay. Coach was simply “caught up in the rhetoric.”

There's even his football-themed cosplay.

First “coach” and then “assistant coach”. He plays as hard as he can, but somehow he can't score on AOC in a game of Madden while playing as the Vikings and having the biggest wideout in the game as a cheat code advantage.

As if the video game football flop, which for some crazy reason was intended as counter-programming for the actual NFL, wasn't enough, he then demonstrated his central political flaw: He doesn't know the difference between a good game and a fatal mistake.

“You could do a mean Pick Six,” said the leading candidate and the man with the least soccer knowledge of anyone with a Y chromosome in the United States.

Then there's his Elmer Fudd era.

Walz pulls out a rifle, embodying a hunter's costume meant to impress anyone who's ever gutted a fish or cleaned and quartered a deer, all while stumbling and stumbling around trying to load his weapon.

In some ways he is the perfect candidate for this presidential candidate who began with the Obama hype in 2008 but appears to be in a crisis like the end of Clinton in 2016, when the patina of inevitability was corroded and curdled by revelation. The glowing rhetoric of joy is a reminder amid the closing insults, the waxwork of former leaders who support her and pop stars about to fall and rise.

Walz is just a simulacrum of masculinity. As Vice President Kamala Harris will tell you, Democrats are in a crisis with men who are themselves in a crisis with a society that they often believe has abolished their male privileges.

They were raised by men who cosplayed. And for better or worse, they think former President Donald Trump is authentic. That's why young men are joining him and why the polls we report keep coming back against Trump.

Can Democrats reverse this narrative? That seems unlikely unless there are further surprises in October.