DENVER — Former president Donald Trump won the straw poll at the Western Conservative Summit on Saturday, one day after his federal indictment was unsealed.
Trump received 40.3% support in the straw poll, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) received 35.8% support, talk-radio show host Larry Elder received 7.7%, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) received 5.8%. Elder and former Arkansas Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson were the only 2024 Presidential candidates in attendance at the summit.
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“We need Trump back in. We owe it to him,” said Peter Boddie, an attendee at the summit. “All the stuff he did for us when he was in office, he got more accomplished for conservatives, more for Christians. He followed through on almost every one of his promises except when his own party, like Mitch McConnell, or somebody held it up.”
Trump’s win in the straw poll comes one day after an indictment was unsealed showing the former president is charged with 37 felony counts related to him keeping classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago residence after he was president.
Some at the event found the prosecution to be politically motivated and the Department of Justice to be targeting Trump, even if they didn’t necessarily support him.
“I think it’s definitely a target; I don’t think he did anything different than probably anybody else does with whatever their documents when they leave office,” said Karen Farrand, an attendee at the summit who thinks the Republican Party needs to move on from Trump. “Whatever people do, he probably did what everybody else does. He’s just the target.”
DeSantis beat Trump in the approval straw poll, where attendees at the event could select from 21 current and potential candidates and could select however many people they approved of in the poll.
In the approval poll, DeSantis and Trump came in first and second, receiving 66.9% and 63.4% approval. Elder received 44.9% approval, Scott received 35.3% approval, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy received 24.2% approval.
“It’s a two-horse race for the Republican nomination for president,” Jeff Hunt, co-chair of the Western Conservative Summit, said in a statement. “The results are clear — Western grassroots conservatives want a fighter who will take on the radical Left and the institutions that are destroying America’s founding principles.”
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According to the straw poll, the top issues for attendees at the event going into the 2024 election cycle were election integrity, religious freedom, education, and border security.
“I think that people are concerned with what’s happened in the country in the last couple of years was illegal immigration or changes in the education structure, and, quite frankly, I think they’re fed up with it, and then we want to return to some normalcy,” said Dave Thomas, an attendee at the event from Tuscon, Arizona.
