Vance Wins CPAC 2028 Straw Poll With 53 Percent of Vote

JD Vance won the Conservative Political Action Conference's 2028 presidential straw poll for the second consecutive year Saturday, but the 41-year-old vice president's grip on the MAGA grassroots showed its first signs of slipping as Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a 32-point surge that reshaped the contours of a race most had assumed Vance owned outright.

Vance captured 53 percent of the vote among attendees at CPAC's four-day conference in Grapevine, Texas, down from 61 percent the previous year. Rubio finished second with 35 percent, a leap from the 3 percent he received at CPAC in 2025.

The gap between Vance and the rest of the field remained cavernous. No other candidate received more than 2 percent of the vote from the more than 1,600 respondents, which CPAC organizers said was a record turnout for a nonpresidential year. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis registered exactly 2 percent, while defense secretary Pete Hegseth, Texas senator Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump Jr. each trailed with single-digit support.

Jim McLaughlin, president of McLaughlin & Associates Polls, offered a blunt explanation for Vance's continued dominance. "JD Vance. And why? Because he's viewed as the closest thing to Donald Trump," McLaughlin said. The pollster framed the survey as a question of who attendees believed would be the Republican nominee and whom they preferred for the presidency in 2028.

The poll provides a snapshot of where grassroots conservative energy lies as President Donald Trump serves his second term, which under constitutional term limits makes him ineligible to seek the presidency again in 2028.

Vance, the former Ohio senator who rose to national prominence with the 2016 publication of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, has been the presumptive standard-bearer of the MAGA movement since Trump's return to the White House. But the CPAC results suggest Rubio is carving real space for himself. Rubio has taken on an increasingly central role in the administration as a key architect of the president's interventionist foreign policy agenda, including the Iran war, a profile that appears to be translating into early support among the conservative base.

The straw poll's predictive power is uncertain at best. CPAC's conservative grassroots crowd is an unscientific sample, and the poll's track record as a primary forecaster is uneven. Trump easily won three CPAC straw polls before his 2024 comeback. But Sen. Rand Paul won three consecutive CPAC polls heading into the 2016 primary, then dropped out of that race early. Mitt Romney won the CPAC straw poll in both 2007 and 2008 over eventual nominee John McCain, and won two more polls before his 2012 primary run while losing two others to Ron Paul.

What the poll does reliably measure is enthusiasm. With more than 1,600 ballots cast, a record for a nonpresidential year according to CPAC organizers, the 2026 straw poll showed the movement's early 2028 energy still flowing toward Vance, but with Rubio closing in ways that would have seemed implausible twelve months ago.