President Donald Trump has publicly mused about running for a third term, but Republican voters have a clear favorite if Trump, 78, is out of the picture.
Nearly half of Republicans support Vice President JD Vance as Trump’s successor, according to a JL Partners poll reported by the Telegraph.
Vance was chosen by 46% of the poll’s Republican respondents to become the party’s 2028 nominee.
Runners up were not even close.
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who lost to Trump in the 2024 Republican primary, received 8% support. Vivek Ramaswamy, another Republican contender, got 7%. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ran in 2016, received 6% support. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) got 6% support as well.
In an NBC News interview, Trump said he had confidence his political movement, which many call the “MAGA movement,” standing for “Make America Great Again,” would continue after he left office.
“You look at Marco, you look at JD Vance, who’s fantastic. You look at — I could name 10, 15, 20 people right now just sitting here,” he said.
At the same time, in a February interview on Fox News, Trump declined to call Vance his successor.
In an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Trump was asked whether he views Vance as his successor and as the Republican nominee for the 2028 general election.
“No. But he’s very capable,” Trump told Baier.
On the Democratic side, the top candidate was former Vice President and 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Harris got 30% support while former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg got 8% support as the next runner up.
Two governors, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gavin Newsom of California, got 7% support each, and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who many call AOC, got 6% support.
