Where did Trump fail to connect?

In the past, one of the major reasons a republican president was unseated was because of the economy.

If you look at this time in 2020, the economy is doing fairly well or consistent with everything going on in the world.

The stock market has grown considerably and created wealth for the investors.

US Economic growth in the last quarter surpassed everything in the past.

Unemployment rates have fallen considerably to 7.9% form the April highs and before the pandemic, it was below 4%.

He triggered the right emotions in the country for all types of people. He talked about China taking over and actively going against in China where others have treaded very carefully. The average blue collar was dead against china for taking manufacturing away, even though they enjoyed the inexpensive Nike shoes :-)

He had something for the white collar as well. He went aggressively after the immigration reforms, mainly H1-B visas, that was for the educated professional people which was the engineers, doctors and scientists. Unfortunately the people who were secretly in favor of his aggressive anti H1-B policies were the very same people who benefitted and got their green cards later becoming citizens and many were registered democrats :-)

A lot of the centrist democrats were fiscally conservative and had conservative values, read the new immigrants in the last 30 years. A lot of them even voted for Trump in 2016.

Why did he still get rejected by the 50% of the voters?

It was the bigoted and the racist hate he was spreading. He made it ok to openly pass racist remarks. People were openly flouting laws that was meant for protecting people in such cases. Something that America as a country has fought very hard to come out of.

Racial equality not only in terms of laws, but also in mind is very important. America was doing so much better in that respect until Trump came along.

A majority of the new Americans are people of color — Hispanics, Asians and people from India. They are very much concerned and afraid of their safety in the country that they have made their home, not just for them, but for their children as well.

Trump made America a very scary place for people of color to live in the country.

I strongly feel, If only he had played correctly in the race card, he would be winning like he did back in 2016.