Tim Walz’s October surprise is no shock — but it will shake the swing states

Polls have razor-thin margins in the seven states that’ll decide the election next month.

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

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz allegedly had a big secret romance with a Chinese Communist Party official’s daughter.

With roughly a week before the election, Jenna Wang made the bombshell allegation that she and the Democrat had a passionate liaison that started in 1989 with lovemaking to the strains of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” only to end in long-distance dissolution, with talk of marriage and Wang’s relocation to America ending in recrimination.

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Timing is everything on a story like this, and this is the classic October surprise, a trick-or-treat bag that makes us wonder how after Walz’s many years in politics, this smoking gun materializes now.

Think of it: “Coach” went to China a few months after the brutal subjugation of martyrs for freedom in Tiananmen Square, which begot mass arrests, a crackdown on media and protest and the end of a perestroika period for Beijing.

And he allegedly courts and sparks someone born into party loyalty.

She says Walz compelled her to sleep in his compartment on a train. Then, if she’s to be believed, they wrote each other for years before it became clear on his 1992 return that they weren’t going to get married.

What does this mean, if anything?

Does it mean Walz was cultivated by someone who very easily could be an agent of foreign influence, with blackmail material held on him until a time to use it?

Many of us have ex-girlfriends or -boyfriends, sure. But how often are they able to make narratively plausible cases about clandestine relationships with Communists, a “passionate” love affair that Wang says made her despair and feel like a “prostitute”?

Or was he simply a young man on the make?

Whatever the answer ultimately is, the song remains the same, and it’s a sour note.

It’s just the latest Walzism that doesn’t add up, like when he got caught in a lie during the JD Vance debate. The ol’ “knucklehead” got it wrong about where he was during the aforementioned 1989 massacre.

But it’s OK. Coach just got “caught up in the rhetoric.”

There’s even his cosplay about football.

First “coach” and then “assistant coach.” He plays that for all it’s worth, but he somehow can’t score on AOC in a game of Madden while playing as the Vikings, with the greatest wideout in the game as a cheat-code advantage.

As if flopping at video-game football designed, for some insane reason, as counterprogramming for the actual NFL wasn’t enough, he then demonstrated his central political flaw: He doesn’t know the difference between a good play and a grievous error.

“You could run a mean pick six,” said the leading candidate to be the man with the least football knowledge of anyone with a Y chromosome in the United States.

Then there’s his Elmer Fudd era.

Walz pulls out a rifle, cosplaying as a hunter like that’s supposed to impress anyone who ever gutted a fish or cleaned and quartered a deer, bumbling and stumbling as he tried to load his gun.

In a sense, he’s the perfect nominee for this presidential candidate, who started off with the hype of Obama 2008 but appears to be in a tailspin like the end of Clinton 2016, when the patina of inevitability was corroded by exposure and curdled. The bright rhetoric of joy a memory amid the closing-argument scoldings, the wax museum of former leaders endorsing, along with pop stars closer to their fall than to their rise.

Walz is but a simulacrum of masculinity. As Vice President Kamala Harris will tell you, Democrats are in a crisis with men, who themselves are in crisis with a society they often believe eliminated their masculine prerogatives.

They were raised by men who cosplayed. And for better or worse, they see former President Donald Trump as authentic. That’s why young men are breaking to him and why the polling we cover keeps breaking Trump’s way also.

Can Democrats reverse that narrative? That doesn’t appear likely unless there are more October surprises to come.