Florida Election Results 2020: President Trump projected to win FL electoral votes

MIAMI, Florida -- *Counties are colored red or blue when the % expected vote reporting reaches a set threshold. This threshold varies by state and is based on patterns of past vote reporting and expectations about how the vote will report this year.

Trump projected to win Florida

In Florida, one of 2020's most crucial battleground states, President Donald Trump's strength in his recently adopted home state delivered a victory over Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

ABC News called the race for Trump at around 12:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Florida is typically decided on razor-thin margins and Trump carried the state in 2016 by just 1.2 percentage points. It is one of the biggest Election Day prizes, offering 29 electoral votes.

With 96% of the expected vote counted, Trump led Biden by over 375,000 votes. The remaining vote left to be counted in Democratic-leaning areas of the state was not enough to overcome Trump's lead of about 3 percentage points.

To win, Biden needed to run up massive margins in the three heavily Democratic counties in south Florida. But early returns showed him underperforming in Miami-Dade County.

That's where Trump and his allies have been branding Democrats as socialists in advertisements for more than a year - a message geared toward south Florida's Cuban population, many of whom fled the island nation after Fidel Castro's communist government came to power.

Florida was a must-win for Trump. Without it, his path to the presidency would have drastically narrowed.

He saturated the state with TV advertising and shifted his residency from New York to Palm Beach County, where he owns the Mar-a-Lago Club, which has been billed as the "Winter White House."

Carlos Gimenez wins House seat over Rep. Mucarsel-Powell

Republican Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez has won a Florida seat in the U.S. House, defeating a single-term Democrat.

Gimenez, a former firefighter, prevailed over Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in a district that stretches from the Miami suburbs to Key West. The seat has swung back and forth between Democrats and Republicans for several elections.

Gimenez has made restoring the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic one of his top campaign issues. Mucarsel-Powell, who is originally from Ecuador, also stressed recovery from the pandemic as a major priority.