By Nathan Layne
GRAPEVINE, Texas, March 28 (Reuters) - Vice President JD Vance is the Conservative Political Action Conference's top choice this year to be the next Republican nominee for U.S. president, according to a straw poll released on Saturday.
About 53% of the more than 1,600 attendees who voted in the poll chose Vance. Secretary of State Marco Rubio came in second with 35% at CPAC, a key annual gathering for Republican lawmakers, activists and presidential hopefuls.
CPAC, which is holding this
year's event in Grapevine, Texas, draws heavily from the Republican Party's conservative wing. Its annual straw poll is not necessarily a reliable predictor of the eventual nominee.
But the poll offers a snapshot of where the energy currently lies among core supporters of President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement. Trump, currently serving his second term, is not eligible to run again in 2028.
At last year's CPAC meeting in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Vance led the straw poll with 61% of the vote, followed by Steve Bannon, a conservative podcaster and Trump adviser during his first term, at 12%, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at 7%.
Rubio, who captured just 3% of the vote last year, has risen in prominence in Trump's second term given his central role in high-stakes overseas actions, including the military operations in Venezuela and Iran.
This year's poll suggests that support among conservatives was consolidating behind Vance and Rubio. No other contender in the poll received more than 2% of the vote.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Grapevine, Texas; Editing by Sergio Non, David Gregorio and Chizu Nomiyama)
