What was the reason Trump failed to win a second term?

[Erebus9]

Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential election, chose one of the options listed as just a handful of topics that Trump has been accused of doing.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Biden has the highest approvals, but what plagued Trump was the abscense of creating an agenda outside of giving out Stimulus checks and free money.

If Biden doesn't create Green Jobs, 2022 will look alot like 2010, but we have 21 months and Covid is exacerbated

Abscense of an Economic agenda outside of Tax cuts

[brucejoel99]

Specifically, having not taken COVID seriously, but that's still just a symptom of his broader issue: that he's Donald Trump.

[Chips]

#1 was the big one.

[TML]

All he had to do was show some professionalism during the pandemic and he would likely have cruised to reelection. Remember that the ruling Labour Party in New Zealand expanded its majority in that country's 2020 election because of how effectively their country's government responded to the pandemic there.

[Annatar]

COVID, he only needed to do 0.6% better to win the tipping point state, in the absence of Covid he easily wins, if he had better approvals in it he would have won.

[Calthrina950]

The coronavirus pandemic, by far. I'm convinced that without coronavirus, Trump would have won a second term. In fact, he could have won a second term had he competently and effectively responded to the pandemic from the beginning.

[ultraviolet]

I’m not convinced the pandemic did much to hurt Trump. It probably both helped and hurt him, and he still would’ve lost without it.

It’s #5 mostly

[LBJer]

I’m not convinced the pandemic did much to hurt Trump.

But given that he would have won the electoral college if he had won three states--Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin--that he lost by less than one percent each, the pandemic didn't have to hurt him a lot to be decisive. 

[ultraviolet]

I’m not convinced the pandemic did much to hurt Trump.

But given that he would have won the electoral college if he had won three states--Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin--that he lost by less than one percent each, the pandemic didn't have to hurt him a lot to be decisive.  

But what if it helped him? His stance of wanting to re-open the country likely played well in a lot of places either because they were sick of lockdowns or needed the economy to open again. All in all it’s probably a wash though

[zachw300]

I hate Trump but to be honest I think he would have beat Biden with his economy before COVID. The only reason Trump lost was because of COVID's impact on the economy.

[LBJer]

It's hard to say for sure how the virus affected the election.  BTW, I should have said he would probably have won the electoral college if he had won those three states because if he had, the electoral count would have been 269-269, so it would have gone to the House.

[Oregon Eagle Politics]

Trump lost the suburbs because he had no filter, so #5.

COVID, the bad economy, and race riots also hurt Trump but less so.

[Idaho Conservative]

Not getting enough COVID relief to people.  If he gave people healthcare and more financial assistance, he'd have easily won.

[Da2017]

Number one Covid. Before I had him as a slight favorite to win. If he acted even semi competently he could have won.

[redjohn]

COVID is obviously the reason, though in the future I'm sure we'll see his loss as a reflection of his poor leadership in general (his COVID handling was just an example shoved in every single voter's face). If the election date was fluid, there were lots of points in his Presidency where he would've lost, however.

If the election had been after Charlottesville, he would've lost. If it had been in early June 2020, he would've lost by a few points more than he did in November. It just happened that in early 2020 things were shaping up decently for him; Biden's average lead shrank from near-double digits to pretty much a dead heat in early 2020. I don't think he ever came close to actually leading nationwide, but we can now be pretty certain that if Biden had won the NPV by less than 4% he would've lost the electoral college. So COVID was the reason for his loss, but it wasn't the reason he was unpopular.