Trump, The Media, And The Achilles Paradox

Corporate media's take on the polls channels the Achilles Paradox:

in logic, an argument attributed to the 5th-century-bce Greek philosopher Zeno, and one of his four paradoxes described by Aristotle in the treatise Physics. The paradox concerns a race between the fleet-footed Achilles and a slow-moving tortoise. The two start moving at the same moment, but if the tortoise is initially given a head start and continues to move ahead, Achilles can run at any speed and will never catch up with it. Zeno’s argument rests on the presumption that Achilles must first reach the point where the tortoise started, by which time the tortoise will have moved ahead, even if but a small distance, to another point; by the time Achilles traverses the distance to this latter point, the tortoise will have moved ahead to another, and so on.

This is, of course, absurd. The link continues.

Aristotle’s solution to it involved treating the segments of Achilles’ motion as only potential and not actual, since he never actualizes them by stopping. In an anticipation of modern measure theory, Aristotle argued that an infinity of subdivisions of a distance that is finite does not preclude the possibility of traversing that distance, since the subdivisions do not have actual existence unless something is done to them, in this case stopping at them.

But the conventional take on the presidential race is that Trump, as Achilles, can only come closer and closer to Harris, the tortoise, but he can never pass her:

A dead heat is getting even hotter for Kamala Harris. . . . The polls say the race is tightening slightly. According to RealClearPolitics’ Sept. 29 average of national polling in a two-way race, Harris leads Trump 49.1 percent to 47.1 percent. That 2-point spread is down slightly from Harris’ 2.2-point advantage a week earlier.

The problem is that Achilles is gaining on the tortoise. As Mark Halperin's Democrat advocate on his 2Way stream, Dan Turrentine, put it the other day,

If you just go back now for the last three to four weeks in Michigan and in Wisconsin, not that Harris was up seven and it went down to four, down to one. It's gone from three, to two, to one, to tied. And at the same time, those Senate candidates, Casey, Slotkin, and Baldwin are seeing the same deadlock.

Halperin himself sums things up later in the same podcast:

[Trump's people] don't necessarily think they're the favorite in Michigan and Wisconsin, but they're not worried about losing it. You don't hear from them, oh my goodness. What you hear is we're moving up, what the three of us are hearing.

We're moving up in those two. We're going to win the three Sunbelt states and we're stronger in Pennsylvania than she is. That to me, if the whole thing's about the Electoral College, you take any of the Rust Belt states away from her, it's very difficult for her to win.

Very difficult. It's not mathematically impossible, but it probably won't happen if she loses any of them. She can replace Pennsylvania with either Georgia, North Carolina, and then one other of the Sunbelt states.

If she loses Pennsylvania and she wins either Georgia or North Carolina, then she just needs one of the other three. That's not impossible, but what I'm telling you today is things are not moving right for her.

The race is "tighter than ever" only if you accept the Achilles Paradox.

UPDATE:

Former President Donald Trump has caught up to Vice President Kamala Harris in a new NBC poll released Sunday. Trump is tied with Harris at 48%, and leads by 47%-46% in an “expanded ballot” with third party candidates.

The poll also shows that Trump’s popularity is increasing, as Harris’s declines, with three weeks until Election Day.