Vice President JD Vance won this year’s straw poll of attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference, with 53 percent of respondents saying he was their preferred choice in the 2028 Republican presidential primary.
The figure, announced by organizers on Saturday, was a slight drop from his 61 percent support in last year’s poll, and it came as Secretary of State Marco Rubio continued to emerge as a contender in early 2028 conversations. Mr. Rubio earned 35 percent of the vote at CPAC this year, a leap from his 3 percent in 2025.
The poll, which came as CPAC wrapped up its annual four-day conference featuring a deeply conservative grass-roots crowd, is unscientific and has not historically been a strong predictor of whom Republican voters will ultimately back in a contested primary.
President Trump easily won three straw polls in the years preceding his comeback victory in 2024. But Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky won the CPAC poll in three consecutive years ahead of the 2016 primary, then went on to drop out early in that campaign. And former Senator Mitt Romney of Utah won straw polls in 2007 and 2008 over the eventual nominee that election cycle, former Senator John McCain of Arizona. Mr. Romney won two straw polls in the lead-up to his successful primary bid in 2012, but lost two to former Representative Ron Paul, Rand Paul’s father.
No other candidate on Saturday received more than 2 percent of support from the more than 1,600 respondents, which organizers at CPAC said was a record for a nonpresidential year.
These were the results for the rest of the field:
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Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida: 2 percent
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Donald Trump Jr.: 2 percent
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Senator Ted Cruz of Texas: 1 percent
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: 1 percent
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Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas: 1 percent
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Representative Rand Paul of Kentucky: 1 percent
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Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence: 1 percent
On a day when several speakers supportive of the Iran war took the stage, including Mr. Cruz and Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah of Iran, CPAC leaders presented the results of their poll as a rebuttal to narratives that the MAGA movement was divided over the war and support for Israel.
Such fissures were on full display throughout the conference, held at a hotel outside Dallas. In what was perhaps a reflection of those divisions, Steve Bannon, a skeptic of the war who spoke at CPAC on Friday, did not receive significant support in this year’s straw poll, after getting 12 percent of the vote in 2025.
Matt Schlapp, the CPAC chairman, and Jim McLaughlin, a Republican pollster, crowed about some of the poll’s other takeaways: Eighty-nine percent of respondents approved of military force to topple the Iranian regime, and 85 percent agreed that Israel was one of the United States’ most important allies.
Respondents overwhelmingly approved of the performances of Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson, but they were less enthusiastic about Senator John Thune, the Republican majority leader who has bucked right-wing efforts to ram a voter identification bill through the chamber, with 57 percent saying they approved of Mr. Thune’s performance.
CPAC attendees named both Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, the “most articulate leftist,” with 34 percent voting for each. And they supported Ken Paxton, the hard-line Texas attorney general, by a wide margin — 67 percent to 21 percent — over Senator John Cornyn in a runoff primary election for Mr. Cornyn’s Senate seat. Mr. Paxton took the stage to pitch himself to the crowd after the numbers were announced.
Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.
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