Algebra and Calculus: Trump and Harris

Now that the contest for the presidency has again become an actual contest, Americans are tuning in more obsessively to pundits and especially pollsters to try to divine changes in the projections, much like baseball fans checking the odds of their team winning a game after every half-inning.  The message voters have generally received is that while Kamala Harris has closed the gap to make the national race a toss-up, Trump still leads or is tied in most of the swing states, the only ones that matter.  In addition, as the Cook Political Report asserted, Harris needs to win the popular vote by at least two percentage points for it to translate into victory in the Electoral College.

But as is often noted, polls are snapshots, measurements of a point in time, like algebra.  Also like algebra, success in even that process depends on the proper employment of both axioms and theorems.  With different polls showing wildly divergent results in measuring the same phenomenon, the reliability of any of them is questionable.  Even the “poll-of-polls,” which purports to even out the discrepancies by combining all the results are building the errors that may be present in each of them into the model.

But the larger problem of relying on polls is the snapshot approach itself.  With an election as much in flux as this one, it seems much more valuable to look not so much at the changes, but rather at the rate of change.  In calculus, the first derivative of position is velocity.  There is little question that the velocity of the presidential race has drastically increased.  But it is the second derivative, acceleration—the rate of change in velocity—that is most interesting.  

Harris’s campaign not only picked up speed but did so at a staggering rate.  The momentum her candidacy generated in a matter of days stunned just about every analyst across the political spectrum.  If that rate of change continued or even held steady, Harris would win in a landslide.  Republicans have become all too aware of that unhappy fact and are trying desperately to reverse or least slow Harris’s momentum before Trump costs them the White House, likely the House, and maybe the Senate.

Trump has made that a much taller order than it should have been.  The panic among Republicans that Trump refuses to abandon his single-minded reliance on personal attacks rather than focusing on policy is palpable.  Of course, Trump is and always has been unable to expound on any substantive issue beyond claiming he will do a very, very great job, the best in history, and his opponent is a corrupt lying moron. To try to slow Harris’s momentum, party flaks, have taken to pretending, at least to the voters, but perhaps also to themselves, that “Trump will win he if he sticks to the issues.”

But would he?

On immigration, for example, one of the few issues where Republicans can claim they were correct when they actually were, Trump himself undermined the argument by publicly instructing Republicans in Congress to vote against a bi-partisan deal largely drafted by one of the Senate’s most conservative members to avoid “giving Biden a win.”  Crime seemed like a winner for Republicans until the crime rate began to drop.  This, coupled with Trump’s vow to pardon the January 6 rioters, which caused Markwayne Mullin, another of the Senate’s most conservative members, to publicly call him out, is another opposition ad in the making.  What is more, trying to equate left-wing protests with an attack that left some police officers dead and dozens injured, as Trump does consistently, hardly burnishes the party’s law and order credentials.  Republicans’ other big issue, inflation, might gain them the most traction, but Trump’s vow to put tariffs on a wide array of consumer products will boost prices instead of lowering them.

A more reasonable candidate, one who actually took the time to learn about the issues and thus be able to speak intelligibly about them, might have been able to score some points with swing voters. 

Trump will not. 

As such, in order to arrest a rate of change that has the potential to lead to a victory larger than even the most optimistic Democrat—or pessimistic Republican—would have predicted, Republicans will be forced to fall in behind their Pied Piper and rely on an increasingly negative message, hoping that those swing voters in key states, the actual American electorate, are not paying attention to what is really going on.

It won’t be easy.  Ana Navarro, who used to be a conservative, characterized Harris’s momentum as looking less like a campaign and more like a movement.  David Axelrod, who by training and temperament approaches elections on tiptoes, tried to temper Navarro’s description by describing the Harris phenomenon as “irrational exuberance,” a phrase made popular by the equally cautious Alan Greenspan.  But Axelrod was one of the architects of another movement that relied on irrational exuberance and swept Barack Obama into the White House.

Whether Harris can maintain this dizzying pace, at least sufficiently to defeat Donald Trump, is hardly a certainty, but as just about any sports fan will attest, momentum can take on a life of its own and carry what was once considered a huge underdog to an unlikely victory.

Whether that will be the result on November 6 will be determined by calculus not algebra.