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The classical invariance principle of Mossel, O’Donnell and Oleszkiewicz states that the distribution of low-degree, low-influence multilinear polynomials under a product distrribution essentially depends only on the first two moments of this distribution.

In recent work with Kindler and Wimmer, we extended this to harmonic multilinear polynomials on the slice. In that work we proved invariance with respect to the following three distributions: the uniform distribution on a slice, the matching skewed distribution on the Boolean cube, and the corresponding Gaussian slice (or Gaussian space; the distributions are the same). That invariance principle requires the function to have low degree and low influences.

While the condition of low influences is necessary when comparing discrete distributions to Gaussian space (consider the polynomial $x_1$), such a condition is no longer necessary when comparing the uniform distribution on a slice to the matching skewed distribution on the Boolean cube. In this paper we prove an invariance principle for these two distributions without any condition on the influences. Using the classical invariance principle, we can easily derive the more general invariance principle that we had proved with Kindler and Wimmer. Our new proof is completely different, and uses a martingale approach.

Complementing the invariance principle, we reprove several properties of harmonic multilinear polynomials. While most of these properties have been proven earlier in my paper using an explicit orthogonal basis for the slice, the proofs appearing in this paper are much simpler and do not require the basis. We hope that the new proofs are easier to generalize to other settings.