Donald Trump speaks at CPAC conference in Orlando on February 28, 2021. Getty Images

 

CPAC Poll Shows Trump Support Shallow
as Comeback Bid Gets Off to Surprise Start

Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside
February 28, 2021

Donald Trump's highly-anticipated return to the stage took a wrong turn on Sunday when almost half of the conservative activists at the CPAC conference voted for other potential presidential contenders in a straw poll that shot a hole in perceptions that he still has an iron lock on the GOP.

The Conservative Political Action Committee had been designed as a pep rally for the former president - with parades of speakers who gushed with praise for Trump. The fallen leader received rave reviews in the CPAC survey with 97 percent job approval and 95 percent support for his policies in the White House.

“We went through a journey like nobody else, there’s never been a journey like it, there’s never been a journey so successful, we began it together four years ago and it is far from being over,” Trump said. “Let there be no doubt, we will be victorious.”

But Trump only had support from 55 percent of the CPAC voters in the whe measured against potential contenders - an amount that's tantatmount to a rebuke for an ex-president who'd appeared to have most if not all the activists in Florida united firmly behind him during the past few days.

Trump may be fuming now after being upstaged by a pair of major allies in first-term Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who were favored in the race for president by 21 percent and 4 percent support respectively in the CPAC poll. DeSantis won a thumbs up from 44 percent of the conservative activists at the event in Orlando when Trump wasn't on the list of potential options.

Noem had raised the specter of national aspirations when she was the featured guest on Friday night in the Central Texas town of Cameron. She was portrayed by Fox News today as the biggest new star at the gathering in Florida where she finished a distant second to DeSantis with 11 percent support in the CPAC survey question without Trump on the list of potential contenders.

But the former president's chilren - Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump - fared poorly when sized up against DeSantis and Noem with only 8 percent and 3 percent of the vote respectively in the CPAC survey.

Trump had come out naming names on Sunday when he declared war on the GOP establishment and implied that he'd be back in a speech that was designed to tease his base while keeping the path to the presidential nomination in 2024 clear for him.

Trump recycled the baseless claims about having the election stolen from him - calling for states to crack down on illegal voting with tighter restrictions on absentee voting and to put an end to mail ballots.

Trump sought to use the CPAC event to reassert his dominance as the undisputed leader of the party. Everything had appeared to be falling into place as planned before the results of the survey were released shortly before the former president was scheduled to speak.

 

 

Donald Trump and Attorney General Ken Paxton play golf before CPAC.

 

 

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