For the second year in a row, US Vice President J.D. Vance has topped the polls at the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), one of the country’s largest right-wing gatherings.
Although this poll is not necessarily accurate, it does give us a clue as to who will ultimately be the Republican nominee for the next presidential election.
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During this year’s four-day conference, attendees were asked which candidate would lead the Republican Party in the 2028 election.
The results were revealed on Saturday’s stage. Mr. Vance received 53% of the votes cast by the approximately 1,600 people in attendance.
But it was another senior official under President Donald Trump who rose to prominence, his top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio, a former senator from Florida, received 35% of the vote.
Rubio, who tied for fourth in last year’s CPAC straw poll, has improved markedly.
The poll, conducted within weeks of Trump starting his second term, gave Vance an approval rating of 61%, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon at 12% and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 7%. Rubio and Representative Elise Stefanik both received 3% of the vote.
Attendees at CPAC, the annual conference, tend to skew further to the right and away from the political center.
Speakers at this year’s conference included Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Iranian opposition leader Reza Pahlavi, and Eduardo Bolsonaro and Flavio Bolsonaro, the sons of Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who was jailed last September for trying to subvert Brazil’s democracy.
But this year’s straw vote comes at a critical time for Republicans.
With less than eight months left until November’s midterm elections in the United States, Republicans hope to protect their parliamentary majority at the polls.
Trump, who has reigned as the party’s standard-bearer for many years, has seen his approval ratings decline since returning to office in 2025. Earlier this week, a poll conducted by news agency Reuters and research firm Ipsos found that only 36% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, a new low.
The ongoing war in Iran and conflict-related economic grievances, including soaring gasoline prices, are contributing to the recession.
President Trump has teased that he may seek a third term, but US law prohibits modern presidents from serving more than two terms. His second presidential term is scheduled to expire in 2028.
That leaves open questions about who will replace the 79-year-old Republican.
Vance, a veteran and former single-term senator from Ohio, is seen as representing a more isolationist wing of President Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) base. Although he has generally opposed U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts, he has defended President Trump’s decision to join Israel in a joint attack on Iran.
Mr. Rubio, on the other hand, has a longer political history than Mr. Vance and is seen as more hawkish on regime change, especially in his family’s ancestral homeland of Cuba. He served in the Florida Senate from 2011 until his unanimous confirmation as Secretary of State in 2025.
Both men were critical of Trump before joining the administration. Mr. Vance once said Mr. Trump was “unfit” to be president, and Mr. Rubio derided Mr. Trump, his rival for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, as a “fraud” and “embarrassing.”
CPAC tends not to survey participants about who should be president if a Republican is already in the Oval Office.
But straw polls conducted before and after President Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021 show a significant realignment within the Republican Party.
In the decade leading up to Trump’s first successful presidential campaign in 2016, moderate Republican Mitt Romney and liberal Rand Paul consistently won CPAC straw votes.
But President Trump has dominated his competitors since his first term.
Despite losing the 2020 election, he still had the most support in the 2021 Straw poll with 55 percent support, a number that rose each year until re-election in 2024.
Experts say the Republican Party has largely solidified around Trump’s politics, and the few remaining moderate and critical voices are increasingly marginalized.
However, CPAC’s straw polls aren’t always accurate. Prior to President Trump’s victory in 2016, a majority of straw poll participants supported Sen. Cruz of Texas as the next president. Mr. Trump came in third place with an approval rating of 15%, behind Mr. Rubio at 30%.
