Vice President JD Vance over the weekend won the Conservative Political Action Conference’s 2028 straw poll for the second straight year, while a surge in popularity for Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed him ahead in a crowded field to take second place after placing a distant fourth last year.
The annual conference was hosted this year in Grapevine, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Just over 50% of the more than 1,600 attendees voted in support of Vance to lead the 2028 ticket, followed by 35% for Rubio. Vance also led last year’s straw poll, but was followed by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon with 12% of the vote. Rubio last year earned just 3% of attendee votes.
The annual straw poll, conducted since the mid-1970s, serves as a barometer for the conservative grassroots and its feelings about a particular candidate, though a crowded field of potential 2028 candidates and Trump’s reticence to name a successor to his Make America Great Again movement have left the road to the Republican presidential nomination seemingly wide open.
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Despite Vance’s back-to-back wins, other 2028 hopefuls also used the occasion to flirt with presidential runs — including Sen. Rand Paul, who has established himself as a vocal opponent to various aspects of Trump’s agenda and become a popular punching bag for the president in recent weeks.
The Kentucky senator told CBS on Sunday that he was “thinking about” running for president in 2028, part of a bid to unite free-market libertarians with the business community.
“I would say 50-50,” Paul said of the odds that he mounts a run for the White House.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has been positioning himself for a potential 2028 run, also told Fox News Digital on Sunday that he had not yet decided if he would embark on a second presidential bid.
Instead, he insisted that his efforts were focused on the upcoming midterm elections.
“If the Democrats take the House, no meaningful legislation will pass for the next two years, and we will see the president impeached over and over and over again,” Cruz said. “And by the way, it won’t matter what for. They will impeach President Trump just because they hate him, because he is Donald Trump.”
“We will see investigations attacking the administration in every House committee,” Cruz added.
At CPAC, the upcoming midterms were a prominent topic of conversation — though Trump’s war with Iran also dominated the weekend-long slate of events. Attendees were divided between support for Trump’s war and the MAGA movement’s past stance against overseas interventionism, a notable split that has only grown deeper in recent weeks.
On Saturday, Reza Pahlavi, the exiled former Iranian crown prince, was met with massive cheers as he made a speech at the annual gathering of conservative power brokers. He said that the end of the war was “within reach” and encouraged the U.S. to “stay the course” to “pave the way for the Iranian people to finish the job.”
“A free Iran is not a fantasy,” said Pahlavi, the son of the country’s last shah, who was overthrown in 1979 amid the Islamic Revolution. “A free Iran is within reach right now, but as we all know, freedom never comes free.”
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