Trump Daytona Beach Rally Friday: Ocean Center Doors at 3:30, the President on Stage at 7 for Donalds and Moody
Kansas and Iowa became phone calls. Daytona Beach did not. Friday's Florida rally is the last in-person stage of the president's closing weekend - at the beachfront hall where he first campaigned in 2016.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - President Donald Trump campaigns in person one more time this weekend, and the stage is in Florida. Trump is scheduled to speak Friday, October 30, at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, campaigning for Republican Byron Donalds for governor and Ashley Moody for the U.S. Senate, four days before the November 3 midterms. The Republican National Committee announced the event hours after Trump's October 23 appearance in Fort Myers, and Reuters' closing-week calendar lists the Daytona rally as the Friday stop.
The logistics are set. The Ocean Center, at 101 N. Atlantic Ave., holds about 9,000 people; doors open at 3:30 p.m. and Trump is expected to take the stage at 7 p.m. Admission is free by registration through the organizers' event page, with a maximum of four tickets per signup - and registration does not guarantee entry, because seating is first-come, first-served. The rally is expected to bring road closures around the beachfront venue. It will be Trump's fourth visit to Daytona Beach since his first stop there on August 3, 2016, as a presidential candidate.
He will not have the hall to himself politically. Several Volusia and Flagler County groups - among them the Port Orange Democratic Club, Just Us Volusia, the Volusia Democratic Socialists of America and Flagler 5051 - are planning protests outside the Ocean Center, the local Democratic club's president among the organizers preparing to make their voices heard as supporters go in.
Daytona's place in the weekend changed on Thursday. The president's Saturday rally in Salina, Kansas, and Sunday rally in Dubuque, Iowa, were both canceled in favor of tele-rallies in at least 19 states - which leaves Friday's Florida stage as the closing weekend's only full rally, in a state his party regards as its own ground, for a governor's race and a Senate seat Republicans intend to hold.
