Two days before the 2024 presidential election, an ABC/Ipsos survey found Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of Republican challenger and former President Donald Trump by three percentage points. On Election Day, Harris supporters were confident the vice president would defeat the former president because he was impeached twice and charged with several felonies after losing the oval office to Joe Biden in 2020. When it became clear that Harris would lose the election, ardent Harris supporters wept in disbelief. Trump not only won the electoral college but he became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years, which surprised pollsters. After Harris conceded, political analysts concluded that the key reason for Harris’ defeat was her failure to successfully separate herself from President Biden. Hillary Clinton explained in “What Happened,” her book detailing how she lost the presidency to Trump in 2016, that revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst but in places where expectations are the most unmet.  54 percent of Americans disapproved of President Biden’s policies, a clear indication that Biden fell short of many expectations. When asked what she would do differently than Biden in terms of policy, Harris responded that she would not do anything different. Her response was a grave error, as the majority of Americans expected her to clarify that a Harris administration would not be a replica of the dismal Biden administration. This demonstrated that Harris’ team had incorrectly assumed that more voters were judging Trump’s character flaws rather than their candidate’s participation in an unpopular administration. The Trump team immediately capitalized on this mistake by producing campaign ads showing Harris boasting she would be no different than Biden. The next time someone asked Harris this question, Harris needed to distance herself from Biden’s unpopular record on inflation, immigration, and foreign policy. But the Harris team failed their candidate by advising her to act “vice presidential.” When asked again, Harris lectured the reporter about vice president decorum. She added that it’s American tradition for VPs not to criticize the president. That may be true, but the uniqueness of this election made it an exception. Typically, voters choose between a first-term president and a challenger or respective party nominees who never have been president. The 2024 presidential election presented voters with a unique situation that has only happened once before in American history. In 1884, the United States elected Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, as its 22nd president. Following his first term, Cleveland lost the presidency to Republican Benjamin Harrison. However, Cleveland defeated Harrison four years later, becoming the 24th president and the first to serve non-consecutive terms. Trump, like Cleveland, lost after his first term and sought to reclaim the presidency, but what makes this situation so unique to voters? Normally the main question facing the voters is: are they better off now than they were four years ago? In this unique situation, the voters aren’t comparing the current administration with campaign promises or competing visions for the future from the respective nominees. The voters have the rare chance to compare their lives under two different administrations, and the question becomes: under whose administration were we better off? The Harris campaign ignored every facet of this unique situation, acting as if voters were judging the candidates’ visions for the future rather than their economic well-being under the different administrations. On Election Day, the majority of voters concluded that they were better off under Trump’s administration than the Biden/Harris administration. Following Harris’ defeat, U.S. senator and former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the White working class, and now it was Latinos and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.” According to Sanders, Harris did not distance herself from Biden in order to defend the status quo. That’s not correct. Harris is a progressive who fights against the status quo. Her political objectives have always been to “fundamentally transform” America. Harris and her team can’t see themselves as the status quo and could never have imagined that voters would see them as “the establishment” and simply reject them. Now it’s no great surprise Harris lost, but it is surprising that the Harris team, whose candidate was a former prosecutor, never bothered to cross-examine their campaign.     The post J. Pharoah Doss: No great surprise Harris lost appeared first on Atlanta Daily World.