CPAC voters pick between Vance and Rubio for 2028 presidential nominee in straw poll

The future of the MAGA movement was once again in focus on Saturday as the results of a straw poll were announced at the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Matt Schlapp’s yearly Trumpfest was in Texas this year, eschewing its typical home in National Harbor, Maryland. A gathering of DC-area conservatives, the event is typically well-attended by the Tea Party wing of the GOP, while more mainstream Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill have long avoided it.

For 2028, the convention’s attendees are eyeing Vice President J.D. Vance as the likely successor to Donald Trump for control over the Republican Party, though the initial results suggest that the one-man dominance of the party’s leadership is finally coming to an end, at least as far as the party’s nominee is concerned.

Vance led Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the CPAC Straw Poll, the annual poll of the conference’s attendees, which the vice president won over MAGAworld puppeteer Steve Bannon last year by a more decisive margin.

Rubio trailed Vance by less than 20 points, 53 percent to 35 percent, in Saturday’s poll, with every other mentioned Republican at 2 percent of the vote or lower.

The poll’s results suggest that Trump’s own chosen running mate remains the obvious favorite among the president’s loyalists.

Vance’s is especially popular with younger voters in the party, while Rubio’s MAGA-fied traditional conservatism has its own sphere of support, which could result in a closely contested battle for control of the party in 2028.

CPAC’s straw poll hasn’t endorsed anyone besides Donald Trump since 2016, the year he first ran for office. Sen. Ted Cruz won the poll that year; a year prior, it was won by Sen. Rand Paul.

In 2021, 2022, and 2023, the president still ran away with the vote at the conservative conference, beating his closest rival, Ron DeSantis, by wide margins each time.

By the time his run for president was underway in 2024, he was back to dominating the polls with more than 90 percent of the vote.

DeSantis’s star has clearly faded within the Republican Party, and on Saturday, he tied Donald Trump Jr. at 2 percent support in the poll.

Vance’s rise and uncertain dominance of the post-Trump MAGA movement come as he has taken a public-facing role in the second Trump administration, with the clear aim of setting himself up as the next leader of American conservative politics.

That has led to risky moments for the vice president, including an on-camera shouting match with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in early 2025.

This year, his discomfort with the president’s military operations in Iran was reported, and his past opposition to interventionism has forced Vance to make an awkward about-face.

The vice president remains a relatively untested political candidate as well, which may complicate his bid for control of the party in Trump’s wake.

His 2022 bid for Senate was punctuated by the endorsement of Trump, whose support catapulted Vance into the lead and allowed the Hillbilly Elegy author to run away with the GOP nomination.

Vance’s greatest personal political victory took place later that year, when, with the support of Trump, he won a decisive victory over Tim Ryan, a now-former congressman, in a year when Joe Biden’s Democrats suffered midterm defeats in line with historical trends.

Vance has never run for office without Trump’s endorsement, boosting his chances with the MAGA base, and it’s not entirely clear that the vice president would automatically win Trump’s support in 2028 if Rubio is also in the running.

The vice president remains the clear favorite, however, for both Trump’s support and overall victory in the primary.

The value of Trump’s endorsement among independents in 2028 is also unclear, however, as the president’s approval rating continues to drop and now sits at just 41 percent in the latest Fox News poll, which was released this month. In other surveys, his approval rating is even lower.