Conservatives from across the country are gathering for the 2026 edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), one of the biggest gatherings of right-wing figures and influencers.
Normally held in the Washington, DC, area, the conference is this year set for Grapevine, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Below are some of the biggest questions looming over this year’s edition.
CPAC 2025 mostly served as a moment of triumph for President Donald Trump.
Four years after his political career seemed finished following the January 6 Capitol riot, there was Trump riding high just a month into his second presidential term, pursuing perhaps the most brazen political agenda in recent White House history.
Elon Musk was on stage with a toy chainsaw, vowing to hack away at the federal workforce (metaphorically). And after a few years of the GOP at least flirting with a less MAGA course, it looked like the party was inexorably red-pilled now.
But a lot can happen in a year, it turns out.
Trump’s poll numbers have taken a nosedive, imperiling the GOP’s hopes of holding both the House and Senate in the 2026 midterms — and Trump’s agenda along with them. And while his base is still very much in his corner, Trump has pursued a number of causes, such as the Iran war, that are clearly testing that unity. We’ll occasionally see lawmakers stand up to him in ways that were previously unthinkable.
One of the big questions is how much the attendees at CPAC choose to reckon with all that — to discuss how to right the ship and how to orient the party moving forward — versus trying to avoid difficult issues.
We’re still trying to figure out how the conservative movement feels about the war. CPAC should give us some indication of how real the divides might be on the right wing.
While the conventional wisdom is that MAGA is united behind the war, the picture of Trump’s base is more nuanced than that.
Self-proclaimed MAGA supporters overwhelmingly say they support the war, but as many as 1 in 5 Republicans and 1 in 4 Trump 2024 voters don’t. Many of the rest are only lukewarm on the war. (Trump’s own vice president and director of national intelligence have conspicuously avoided full endorsements, and another Trump administration official recently resigned over it.) Plenty of prominent conservative influencers are explicitly against it.
The list of speakers includes exiled Iranian opposition leader and Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. It includes prominent supporters of the war like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and former United Nations Ambassador Mark Wallace, who heads a group called United Against Nuclear Iran. But it also features skeptics of the war such as former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
At least so far, the speakers list doesn’t include some of the most prominent anti-Iran war influencers such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly – the types who might really try to marshal opposition to Trump’s war.
But it would also be telling if the gathering just avoids huge shows of support for the war.
How do Rubio and Vance stack up two years before the 2028 primaries?
Related to the above issue is how the party starts to orient itself ahead of 2028.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, Vice President JD Vance has been seen as Trump’s heir apparent, and he’s got the 2028 poll numbers to back that up.
But the Iran war and Trump’s increasing interventionist streak have pushed Vance somewhat to the back seat. And all the while, the fortunes of Trump’s more hawkish Secretary of State Marco Rubio have appeared to be on the rise.
We shouldn’t expect the conservative movement to start picking sides two years before the first 2028 primaries. But gatherings like this — along with the CPAC straw poll — can send signals about the most passionate portions of the base.
If CPAC warms to Rubio, who hasn’t generally been terribly MAGA-friendly, that could signal more of a fight for the future of the movement than we might have otherwise anticipated.
(Neither man is thus far slated to attend.)
It’s been more than three weeks since Trump said he would intervene in the Texas GOP Senate runoff between Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton, in hopes of ending the brutal contest. GOP leaders backing Cornyn see him as more electable in a key race against Democratic nominee state Rep. James Talarico.
But the politics of that were never easy, given that MAGA is much more on board with Paxton, and Trump still hasn’t followed through on his promise.
The venue this weekend in the Dallas-Fort Worth area should push this very important choice for the GOP base back to the forefront.
Paxton is due to speak. In fact, he’s got a prominent slot as the featured speaker at CPAC’s Ronald Reagan Dinner on Friday night.
CPAC also invited Cornyn to speak, but Cornyn has declined, citing the fact that CPAC has endorsed Paxton.
If CPAC turns into a rallying moment for Paxton, that could make it even more difficult for Senate GOP leaders to get a Trump endorsement of Cornyn. And Paxton winning the May 26 runoff is clearly what Democrats would prefer, given his history of personal and official scandals.
In recent years, the right has demonstrated a knack for nominating problematic Senate candidates who imperil — and often lose — very winnable races. But the party is flirting with yet another major risk.
The Iran war is a much bigger focus right now, but don’t sleep on the Epstein files.
Much of the GOP base appears to have heeded Trump’s call for everyone to move on, but this is the kind of crowd where this issue once loomed very large.
There are also some key speakers with proximity to the issue. Those include Bannon, who had a cozy relationship with Epstein in his later years but has avoided a significant backlash on the right thus far.
They also include Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has been the public face of the DOJ’s release of the files, which hasn’t satisfied many Americans. And they include House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky, whose committee has pursued subpoenas related to the Epstein files.
There are reasons to believe this event’s influence might be on the wane.
The list of speakers doesn’t exactly read like a who’s who of the conservative right. And the agenda doesn’t include Trump, Vance or many other high-profile Trump administration officials like Rubio.
(Those who are slated to appear include Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, border czar Tom Homan and Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz.)
Assuming Trump doesn’t add a last-minute appearance, it would be the first time he has skipped the event since he pulled out of it in 2016, citing a desire to stay on the campaign trail.
But that was at a time when CPAC was considerably less Trumpy. Since then, the event has served as an opportunity for him to rally the base and show much of it was in his corner.