Trump Casts Ballot in Florida, Encourages Voters to ‘Stay in Line’

Former President Donald Trump cast his ballot on Tuesday at a polling site in Palm Beach, Florida, and encouraged supporters to stay in line to vote on Election Day.

Speaking beside his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, he told reporters that “many more Republicans” appear to be voting than Democrats.

“I’m hearing that we’re doing very well everywhere,” he said, referring to Election Day voting.

Trump urged Republicans on multiple occasions during the press event “to stay in line” at polling sites across the United States on Election Day.

“I need you to deliver your vote no matter how long it takes. Stay in line!” he told his supporters on the platform, adding that Democrats “want you to pack up and go home.”

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Trump also said that illegal immigration is the “number one issue” of the presidential race in 2024.

“We can’t allow criminals to be put back into our country or to be put into our country,” Trump said about illegal immigrants.

He said that the issue outpaces inflation or the economy.

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), cast his ballot at a church in Cincinnati, Ohio, and said he has a good feeling about the election.

“The best way to heal the rift in the country is to try to govern the country as well as we can, create as much prosperity as we can for the American people and remind our fellow Americans that we are all fundamentally on the same team however we voted.”

During an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said, “We’re going to be patient,” warning that some battleground states won’t be finished until later in the evening.

“We’re going to be very focused on what’s happening in the early part of the night. But we know some of our bigger battleground states are not going to be fully tallied until later in the night or early in the morning.”

O’Malley Dillon said she is hopeful that early turnout in Georgia and North Carolina was a positive sign for the Harris campaign.

By the time early voting in North Carolina had ended on Saturday, more than 4.4 million voters had cast their ballots. It was particularly robust in the 25 western counties affected by Hurricane Helene. Georgia, meanwhile, saw more than 4 million voters cast early ballots, a record-breaking number for the state.

Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, already cast his vote on Oct. 23.

In a break from their stance in 2020, Republicans including Vance and Trump have urged their supporters to vote early. Data provided by the University of Florida show that significantly more people voted early in person during the 2024 election than in the 2020 contest, which saw significant mail-in voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic and government restrictions.

Harris plans to attend an election night party at Howard University in Washington, a historically black university where she graduated with a degree in economics and political science in 1986 and was an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he plans on watching the Election Day results come in at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.