It's October, and just as everyone thought, we're not coasting to the finish line of this election. The month kicks off with a multi-state disaster in the form of Hurricane Helene, a labor strike on all east coast ports in the United States, and Israel and Iran ratcheting up more direct confrontation. It's not a place Kamala Harris wants to be, which is why the refrain, "Where is the President and Vice President?" is getting deafening in all these events.

Hurricane Helene is going to go down as one of the deadliest and most costly storms in United States history. As of the time I'm writing this, the death toll sits at 162, with hundreds more still missing. Road, electric, and telecommunications infrastructure in Southern Appalachia are all wiped out. Rebuilding will take years and billions of dollars.

It's also slowly morphing into a political disaster. The governors of North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina have all toured the aftermath of Helene in their states and worked together to try to fix the problem. The congressional delegation from each state is also touring.

They were not alone. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced Operation Blueridge to help other states, while Florida continues its recovery operations. Donald Trump started touring Georgia and raising money for storm relief victims.

In short, everyone has pitched in to help the region, raise awareness, and begin recovery while search and rescue is ongoing—everyone, that is, except Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. When will they visit? Plans to visit some states are underway, while others are "on the horizon." They claim they don't want to burden everyone, which is funny as an excuse given that every other politician involved in these states has already toured the damage and started on the next steps.

By the time Biden and Harris show up, they'll be the last ones on the scene. Their response to this echoes their equally abysmal response to the East Palestine, Ohio derailment, which ended up becoming a national tragedy. And as they finally start showing up in these states, the comparisons to Hurricane Katrina are getting stark.

That's not all. We're now in the middle of a labor strike for all East Coast ports in the United States—from New York to New Orleans. Ports are shut down, threatening another supply chain crisis in the middle of the election.

The Teamsters issued a statement standing with the longshoreman strike. Notably, the Teamsters aimed their ire directly at Biden and the White House, saying, "The U.S. government should stay the f**k out of this fight and allow union workers to withhold their labor for the wages and benefits they have earned."

The anger from Teamsters and other union groups at the government is notable because it's a throwback to the rail worker's strike of 2022. After unions started rejecting Biden's tentative plan, which punted the issue until after the elections, he rammed it through Congress to prevent any strike. Those same unions saw this as a betrayal for aiding Biden during a political crunch.

Two years later, the Teamsters refuse to endorse Harris, and Trump is getting strong union support. Notably, Harris is polling worse among union households than any Democrat since Walter Mondale. Harris is running below Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden among blue-collar workers as a whole.

Biden could end the port strike now if he so desired. Taft-Hartley gives Presidents the authority to declare a cooling-off period, which forces the unions back to work. Doing so would get Democrats beyond the election. Biden is declining to invoke that rule. He claims he's doing this because he "doesn't believe in Taft-Hartley." In reality, if he drops another hammer on unions just before the election, Harris would lose even more ground to Donald Trump in the polls.

Both the Hurricane disaster and the port strikes disproportionately impact working-class voters. They're the ones dealing with the brunt of hurricane relief in rural America, and union workers are in this strike. Biden and Harris are failing on both fronts. 

Additionally, the Middle East is on fire, with Israel and Iran ratcheting up actions against each other. Kamala Harris' running mate, Tim Walz, imploded in the Vice Presidential debate against J.D. Vance. And Democrats have a month to right the ship as we head down the stretch. 

Sometimes, October surprises are events no one sees coming. Other times, they are issues created by the candidates themselves. Kamala Harris is in the second category. She has to convince the American people she's up for this job, and right now, she can't even respond to a hurricane correctly.