John McEntee topped two college Republican straw polls for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, a surprising early show of support that put him ahead of J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Ron DeSantis on two campuses. The results gave a low-profile figure in the race a burst of attention at a moment when the field is still taking shape.
The Tennessee poll put McEntee at 31.3 percent, ahead of Rubio at 29.7 percent, DeSantis at 23.4 percent and Vance at 15.6 percent. At Pennsylvania State University, he did even better, with 42 percent support in a GOP presidential primary straw poll, followed by Rubio at 23 percent, DeSantis at 15 percent, Thomas Massie at 11 percent and Vance at 8 percent. For a man with more than 3 million followers on TikTok, the numbers show that his online reach is starting to translate into at least some campus support.
That support comes from a political profile built in and around Donald Trump’s first administration. McEntee served as director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, later co-founded the conservative dating app The Right Stuff and worked as a senior adviser on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 initiative. He has also drawn attention online for a viral 2024 X post joking about removing the 19th Amendment and for a TikTok video earlier in 2024 in which he said he gives fake money to homeless people so they get arrested when they use it.
Even so, the campus results sit against a broader picture that points another way. As of early Friday afternoon, McEntee was rated fourth on Kalshi’s market for the 2028 Republican presidential nominee, with a 5.3 percent chance. Polymarket had Vance ahead at 32 percent, Rubio at 18 percent, DeSantis at 16 percent and McEntee tied with Tucker Carlson at 4 percent. The Economist/YouGov poll also showed Vance in front at 40 percent, with Rubio at 33 percent, DeSantis at 14 percent and Donald Trump at 9 percent.
That gap matters because college Republican straw polls capture only a small and unrepresentative slice of the GOP electorate. Still, the campus vote suggests McEntee has found a lane with younger activists, and even College Republicans at Tennessee said he had quietly become the favorite of the youth, closely followed by Rubio. Penn State College Republicans called their result a shocking upset. The larger question now is whether those students are seeing the future of the party sooner than the rest of the Republican base, or whether McEntee’s edge is just the kind of campus-size surprise that fades once the wider 2028 contest starts to harden.
