Joe Biden won the 2020 election against Donald Trump, when Kamala Harris, also a Democrat, could not in 2024? Why?

Biden in 2020 was only the third person since the Second World War to topple a duly elected president (Trump) after just one term. His win, by a popular vote margin of four million, further accentuates the why behind this question.

Multiple reasons have been put forward This opinion writer thinks there is one overriding reason – we, but in this case Americans, did not have the freedom of choice, the freedom of will to choose. Commentors can agree or disagree, as they see fit.

1. Biden was a male leader. We, the human race, have followed male leaders since we evolved from chimpanzees. It is built into our genetic makeup. There have been dominant female leaders - Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon, who followed her assassinated Prime Ministerial husband, the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, Kim Campbell 19th prime minister of Canada, Julia Gillard of Australia , and an early British tribal leader Boudica. But never has there been a female president in the United States, although over 30 women have run for President.

2. . Biden came through as the stronger, more to-be-followed leader than Trump in 2020. Biden's election took place during the Covid pandemic with unprecedented social unrest. Trump was a conservative, against anti- covid masks and lockdowns. From the outbreak of the coronavirus, the president downplayed the risks of COVID-19 - questioning the effectiveness of masks, touting unproven treatments and criticizing his own health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He initially refused to be photographed with a mask on and mocked former Vice President Biden for wearing one. More than 1 million people, or 1 in every 331 Americans died from the covid pandemic. In short, it was a period of great danger, but Trump did not offer the leadership people sought.

3. But why then was Trump elected this time? This time he was the stronger leader, or at least appeared so. Associated Press reported: "As he prepares to return to the White House, Trump has vowed to swiftly enact a radical agenda that would transform nearly every aspect of American government". That includes plans to launch the largest deportation effort in dthe nation's history, to use the justice Department to punish his enemies, to dramatically expand the use of tariffs and to again pursue a zero-sum approach to foreign policy that threatens to upend longstanding foreign alliances, including the NATO pact.

4. In summary, Americans found Donald Trump an inadequate leader in 2020, Kamala Harris so in 2024. It goes back to our inherited genetic drives. In short, it is a question of whether we have the freedom to make our own choices. This article asserts, and provides considerable evidence to support the concept that our decisions are limited, that we do not have entirely a freedom of choice, a free will, and that inherited genetic behaviour dictated the American elections in 2020 and 2024

There are a multitude of eminent people who have argued whether or not we have free will. This paper sets out the assertions of these writers, both for and against, and then outlines the author's conclusion that we have a guided or influenced decision process. That we do not have a completely free will.

Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times best sellers, in his bookFree Will confidently declares "…we know that determinism, in every sense relevant to human behavior, is true…. In effect, we are nothing more than biochemical robots whose thoughts and actions are dictated by causal forces we don't control."

Determinism is the concept that everything that happens in the world is determined completely by previously existing causes.

Robert M Sapolsky's Determined: Life Without Free Will is a book with a similar theme. Why do we do the things we do? Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's attempt to answer that question as fully as he could,

Sapolsky also wrote: Behave. The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Sam Harris' Waking Up has also been praised by critics. Frank Bruni of The New York Times wrote, "Harris's book ... caught my eye because it's so entirely of this moment, so keenly in touch with the growing number of Americans who are willing to say that they do not find the succour they crave, or a truth that makes sense to them, in organized religion." He notes that since publishing The End of Faith in 2004, Harris has shifted focus to some extent from criticizing religion to trying to understand what people seek in religion and arguing these benefits are possible without it.

Harris wrote Letter to a Christian Nation two years later.

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, #1 New York Times bestselling book is also a free will sceptic, stating:

We do not have the freedom and free will that we think we do. Yes, you can make conscious choices, but everything that makes up those conscious choices (your thoughts, your wants, your desires) is determined by prior causes outside your control. Just because you can do what you want does not mean you have free will because you are not choosing what you want in the first place.

Jerry A. Coyne Professor of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago, and author of Why Evolution is True is yet another who argues that we do not have free will:

Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don't have it. In Free Will, Sam Harris combines neuroscience and psychology to lay this illusion to rest at last. Like all of Harris's books, this one will not only unsettle you but make you think deeply.

Sam Harris also endorses Coyne.

There are the alternate positions. David Lawrence's, Debunking Determinism: Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, and the Crusade Against Free Will in a paperback in 2023, is possibly the most powerful of the pro-free will protagonists. Born and raised in Los Angeles, where he received a BA from UCLA and a JD, Lawrence does not have the academic qualifications of Sapolsky and Harris. Finding himself frustrated by the popular presentations about the nature of consciousness, David sought to explore the conventional wisdoms of pop culture, in particular the question of whether we have free will or are determined. He argues that free will is losing the battle. Determinists are tirelessly spreading the gospel of causation. They dominate social media, podcasts, and YouTube, he asserts.

Another protagonist of free will is Kevin J. Mitchell in Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will published by Princeton University Press in 2023.

Associate professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, Mitchell is also the author of Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are (Princeton) and runs a popular blog, Wiring the Brain. A search on that blog will reveal Undetermined - a response to Robert Sapolsky. Part 4 - Loosening the treaties of fate. His work has appeared in publications such as Scientific American, the Guardian, and Psychology Today.

Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell's argument has important implications-for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence. Note that Kevin Mitchell is an Associate Professor, an academic ranking below full professor.

Gregg D. Caruso's edited volume, Exploring the Illusion of Free will and Moral Responsibility is a collection of new essays bringing together an internationally recognized line-up of contributors, most of whom hold sceptical positions of some sort,

Compatibilism, as the name suggests, is the view that the existence of free will and moral responsibility is compatible with the truth of determinism. In most cases, compatibilists (also called "soft" determinists) attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will.

Compatibilism has an ancient history, and many philosophers have endorsed it in one form or another. In Book III of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle (384–322 BC) wrote that humans are responsible for the actions they freely choose to do - ie, for their voluntary actions. While acknowledging that "our dispositions are not voluntary in the same sense that our actions are," Aristotle believed that humans have free will because they are free to choose their actions within the confines of their nature.

Determinism is the view that all human decisions and actions, are inevitable. Historically, debates about determinism have involved many philosophical positions and given rise to multiple varieties or interpretations of determinism. Some philosophers have maintained that the entire universe is a single determinate system, while others identify more limited determinate systems. Another common debate topic is whether determinism and free will can coexist; compatibilism and incompatibilism represent the opposing sides of this debate.

An additional thought.

The brain takes a long time to form completely. The wiring in a teenager's brain is only about 80 per cent completed (which may not come as a great surprise to the parents of teenagers). Although most of the growth of the brain occurs in the first two years and is 95 per cent finished by the age of ten, the synapses aren't fully wired until a young person is in his or her mid to late twenties. That means that the teenage years effectively extend well into adulthood. In the meantime, the person in question will almost certainly have more impulsive, less reflective behaviour than his elders, and will also be more susceptible to the effects of alcohol. 'The teenage brain is not just an adult brain with fewer miles on it, 'Frances E. Jensen, a neurology professor, told Harvard Magazine in 2008. It is, rather, a different kind of brain altogether.

This writer's opinion.

Is that we have limited or constrained free will. He bases this option on three thoughts:

1.His dog: he has written a book on his dog Dodger. published by Amazon in which he notes that dogs have loved us for thousands of years. The book has a photo of a Roman couple in bed with their dog. His theory is that some Neanderthal kid offered a wolf pup a feed, the pup decided to stay and turned into our faithful friend. Search on the web for "Why do dogs love us?" Scientists believe that our friendship goes back 40,000 years. It is buried deep into their genes, passed on from generation to generation. If a behaviour can pass on through generations of dogs then it is not unreasonable to assume that human behaviour can be passed on through the generations.

2. Then if so, our behaviours are passed on from generation to generation, buried deep in our genes. So, if we evolved from some form of chimpanzee, that ancestry is tribal and we reflect what that tribal behaviour was like. It was survival of the fittest. The National Library has an article on it "The Law of Evolution: Darwin, Wallace, and the Survival of the Fittest". And how would tribes survive back then? By following the leader that promised the most, by taking the land that was the most productive, even though other tribes were there beforehand. In short, we have kept those genes buried deep within us. They are fuelling our conflicts today

3, The world today is seeing many conflicts, the Israel Palestine war and Ukraine invasion being the most objectionable. Historians tell us that we, the world, has suffered war for most of our existence Do we want that? This writer has written another book Ending War that says we do not want wars, so why have we experienced them? It is in our genes. It explains why we have followed autocratic leaders over the generations. It also answers the question of whether the world has free will, The answer is that war is a worldwide affliction that we have experienced for millennia.

So we do not have completely free will. I call it a guided, limited or constrained decision process. How to beat it requires more research and perhaps another article. But one area of research is clearly obvious The United Nations is charged with ensuring peace - it has been ineffective. The evidence is on our TV screens every night. This writer has written about it on On Line Opinion.

To return to the question that opened this opinion paper: Joe Biden won the 2020 election against Donald Trump, when Kamala Harris, also a Democrat, could not in 2024? Why? I hope this question has been answered. This writer was so certain that his analysis of the Harris vs Trump contest was correct that he even placed a small wager on Trump. Even though his preference was for Harris.