For the second year in a row, United States Vice President JD Vance has topped the straw poll at the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), one of the biggest right-wing gatherings in the country.
The poll is a bellwether – albeit, not necessarily an accurate one – for who might ultimately become the Republican nominee for the next presidential race.
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During this year’s four-day conference, attendees were asked which candidate they would prefer to lead the Republican Party ticket for the 2028 election.
The results were revealed on stage Saturday. Vance had swept up 53 percent of the votes cast by nearly 1,600 attendees.
But rising up the ranks was another senior official under US President Donald Trump: his top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. A former senator from Florida, Rubio notched 35 percent of the vote.
It was a markedly improved standing for Rubio, who tied for fourth place at last year’s CPAC straw poll.
That poll, taken within weeks of Trump starting his second term, showed Vance with 61 percent support, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon with 12 percent, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis with 7 percent. Rubio and Representative Elise Stefanik both earned 3 percent.
Attendance at CPAC, an annual conference, tends to skew away from the political centre and farther to the right.
Speakers at this year’s conference included Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Iranian opposition leader Reza Pahlavi, and Eduardo and Flavio Bolsonaro, the sons of Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who was imprisoned last September for attempting to subvert his country’s democracy.
But this year’s straw poll comes at a critical time for the Republican Party.
Less than eight months remain until November’s midterm elections in the US, and Republicans are hoping to defend their congressional majorities at the ballot box.
Trump, long the standard-bearer for his party, has seen his approval numbers sink since his return to office in 2025. Earlier this week, a survey from the news agency Reuters and the research firm Ipsos found that only 36 percent of US citizens approved of his job performance, a new low.
The ongoing war in Iran and economic frustrations, including rising gas prices linked to the conflict, are among the factors contributing to the slump.
While Trump has teased he may seek a third term, US law prevents modern presidents from serving more than two. His second presidency is set to expire in 2028.
That leaves an open question as to who may succeed the 79-year-old Republican.
Vance, a veteran and former single-term senator from Ohio, is seen to represent a more isolationist branch of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) base. He has generally been opposed to US involvement in foreign conflicts, though he has defended Trump’s decision to join Israel in joint strikes on Iran.
Rubio, meanwhile, has a longer political resume than Vance and is seen to be more hawkish towards regime change, particularly in his family’s ancestral home of Cuba. He served as a senator for Florida from 2011 until his unanimous confirmation as secretary of state in 2025.
Both men had been critical of Trump before joining his administration. Vance once called Trump “unfit” for office, and Rubio derided Trump as a “con artist” and an “embarrassment” when he was a rival candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
CPAC tends not to survey participants about who should be president when a Republican is already in the Oval Office.
But the straw polls it held before and after Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2021, have shown a noticeable realignment in the Republican Party.
In the decade leading up to the 2016 election – Trump’s first successful campaign for office – moderate Republican Mitt Romney and libertarian Rand Paul consistently won the CPAC straw polls.
Ever since his first term, however, Trump has trounced the competition.
Despite his 2020 election defeat, he still garnered the most backing in 2021’s straw poll, with 55 percent support, and his numbers climbed each successive year, through to his re-election in 2024.
Experts have noted that the Republican Party has largely consolidated around Trump’s politics, with the few remaining moderate and critical voices increasingly marginalised.
The CPAC straw poll, however, is not always accurate. Ahead of Trump’s victory in 2016, the majority of straw poll participants backed Senator Cruz of Texas to be the next president. Trump came in third place with 15 percent support, trailing Rubio at 30 percent.