Miami Democrats have blamed Biden's Florida defeat on backlash from Hispanic and Latino voters over the Black Lives Matter movement and their 'extreme' efforts to defund the police.
Florida was among the key battleground states in this year's presidential race and a must-win for Trump, whose 2016 victory in the state played a major factor in his win.
The president managed to secure the state once again on Election Night thanks to his improved numbers with Latinos, whose turnout in counties with large populations was bigger than it was four years ago.
But Democrats say Trump's win is also proof that Biden failed to get through to the demographic, an issue Democratic Latino activists had been flagging for months ahead of the election.
In the Miami area, the Latino community is largely made up by Cuban Americans, where generations of families have fled communist rule in Cuba.
Trump's messages about Biden being a socialist seemed to win over the Cuban and Venezuelan communities in Miami-Dade County despite Biden's denials.
'It's proof positive Democrats couldn't rebut the socialist attack and that the Biden campaign just didn't know what it was doing,' Biden donor and Miami Democratic strategist Alejandro Miyar told Politico.
Another top Democrat who was not named believes Biden must have 'gotten obliterated by Hispanics' who had fought against BLM and police reform efforts.
'Defund the police killed us,' the Democrat said. 'We came out strong for BLM and then saw the Hispanic push back and went lukewarm and got killed.'
For months there had been complaints from Democratic Latinos that Biden was ignoring Hispanic voters and lavishing attention instead on black voters in big Midwestern cities.
Democratic US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reiterated those concerns shortly after the results rolled in overnight.
'I won't comment much on tonight's results as they are evolving and ongoing, but I will say we've been sounding the alarm about Dem vulnerabilities w/ Latinos for a long, long time,' she tweeted.
'There is a strategy and a path, but the necessary effort simply hasn't been put in.'
Opinion polls in key states showed Biden under-performing with Latinos in the weeks leading up to the election.
A national exit poll by Edison Research showed that while Biden led Trump among nonwhite voters, Trump received a slightly higher proportion of the nonwhite votes than he did in 2016.
The poll showed that about 11 per cent of African Americans, 31 per cent of Hispanics and 30 per cent of Asian Americans voted for Trump, up 3 percentage points from 2016 in all three groups.
There were no signs of disruptions or violence at polling sites on Tuesday, as some officials had feared.
Biden put Trump's handling of the pandemic at the center of his campaign and had held a consistent lead in national opinion polls over the Republican president.
But a third of US voters listed the economy as the issue that mattered most to them when deciding their choice for president, while two out of 10 cited COVID-19, according to an Edison Research exit poll on Tuesday.
Trump is seeking another term in office after a chaotic four years marked by the coronavirus crisis, an economy battered by pandemic shutdowns, an impeachment drama, inquiries into Russian election interference, racial tensions and contentious immigration policies.
Biden is looking to win the presidency on his third attempt after a five-decade political career including eight years as vice president under Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama.
He has promised a renewed effort to fight the public health crisis, fix the economy and bridge America's political divide.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
