Vance wins CPAC straw poll, but Rubio gains steam among MAGA faithful
GRAPEVINE, Texas — Vice President JD Vance won this year’s straw poll of attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference, with 53% of respondents saying he was their preferred choice in the 2028 Republican presidential primary.
The figure, announced by organizers Saturday, was a slight drop from his 61% 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. Rubio earned 35% of the vote at CPAC this year, a leap from his 3% in 2025.
The poll, which came as CPAC wrapped up its annual four-day conference featuring a deeply conservative grassroots crowd, is unscientific and has not historically been a strong predictor of whom Republican voters will ultimately back in a contested primary.
President Donald Trump easily won three straw polls in the years preceding his comeback victory in 2024. But Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky won the CPAC poll in three consecutive years before the 2016 primary, then went on to drop out early in that campaign. And former Sen, Mitt Romney of Utah won straw polls in 2007 and 2008 over the eventual nominee that election cycle, former Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Romney won two straw polls before his successful primary bid in 2012, but lost two to former Rep. Ron Paul, Rand Paul’s father.
No other candidate on Saturday received more than 2% 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:
— Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: 2%
— Donald Trump Jr.: 2%
— Texas Sen. Ted Cruz: 1%
— Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: 1%
— Texas Gov. Greg Abbott: 1%
— Kentucky Rep. Rand Paul: 1%
— Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence: 1%
On a day when several speakers supportive of the Iran war took the stage, including 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% of the vote in 2025.
Matt Schlapp, CPAC’s chair, and Jim McLaughlin, a Republican pollster, crowed about some of the poll’s other takeaways: Nearly 90% of respondents approved of military force to topple the Iranian regime, and 85% agreed that Israel was one of the United States’ most important allies.
Respondents overwhelmingly approved of the performances of Trump, Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson, but they were less enthusiastic about Sen. John Thune, the Republican majority leader who has bucked right-wing efforts to ram a voter identification bill through the chamber, with 57% saying they approved of Thune’s performance.
CPAC attendees named California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani the “most articulate leftist,” with 34% voting for each. And they supported Ken Paxton, the hard-line Texas attorney general, by a wide margin — 67% to 21% — over Sen. John Cornyn in a runoff primary election for Cornyn’s Senate seat.
Paxton took the stage to pitch himself to the crowd after the numbers were announced.