OXON HILL, Maryland — The Conservative Political Action Conference's return to the nation's capital has proved to be less than triumphant, with the mainstay political conference suffering from lower attendance and fewer high-profile sponsors.

The conference, once a mandatory stop for aspiring Republican presidential candidates, saw several notable Republicans such as former Vice President Mike Pence, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), and numerous other governors skip the high-profile convention. Meanwhile, longtime attendees noted a sea-change in the number of attendees and sponsors.

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Vickie Froehlich, an attendee who said she had attended the conference multiple times, noted the lower attendance and said the absence of Fox News in the media hub and the exhibit hall likely contributed to the event's inability to draw presidential aspirants.

"It's been a huge difference that Fox is not here," Froehlich said. "Fox helped get the candidates out here to be interviewed, so it's noticeable to me that they're not here." Several other attendees the Washington Examiner spoke to similarly noted the smaller crowd.

The absence of high-profile attendees was exacerbated by the Club for Growth's donor retreat, which is drawing many of the notable figures who skipped out on CPAC. And further complicating the conference's image are sexual assault accusations leveled against its Chairman Matt Schlapp by a former male staffer of Herschel Walker's Georgia senate campaign. Schlapp has denied the allegation.

Dennis Lennox, a Republican strategist from Michigan, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that he had attended every CPAC since 2007 and identified three factors as the primary driver of the event's struggle to draw attendees: overpriced tickets, an identity crisis about the conference's purpose, and an increase in competitor events.

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"I'm old enough to remember when the CPAC registration fee was like $60," Lennox said. "Now it's a couple hundred dollars, and D.C. is not an inexpensive place for a lot of the people from across the country to come and visit, particularly the activist types. ... They've probably priced themselves out so that if they were half the price, they would probably have double the attendees."

Lennox said he estimated a crowd of roughly 2,200 attendees at the 2023 edition of the event, the first since 2020 to take place at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. The event moved to Florida for its 2021 and 2022 iterations.

Information on the number of sold tickets is not publicly available, but a Washington Post report from this week said the event was lagging behind previous attendance numbers.

"I can remember CPACs from five, six, 10 years ago when there were 10,000 paid registered attendees," he said. "I would be shocked if there are more than 2,200 attendees this year based on the way the ballroom is configured and the amount of people I've seen around CPAC in 2 1/2 days."

The view inside the conference's main hall included hundreds of empty seats as attendees listened to speeches from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, and others.

The absence of groups such as Turning Point USA, which previously brought hundreds of students to the conference, also likely contributed to the lower turnout.

But while the cost of the ticket to attend the conference has skyrocketed — the face value for a four-day general admission ticket to the 2023 event is $295 — Lennox said the event is "not a conservative conference anymore."

"This is a MAGA, ultra-MAGA, and 'America First' confab, and I think those are three distinct things," he said. "There's a lot of conservatives that just don't come here anymore, not never-Trumpers necessarily but just a lot of conservatives from the wide range of conservative tribes. I can remember when you used to have Ron Paul and Rand Paul-like libertarians debating foreign policy with Donald Rumsfeld on the stage of CPAC."

"Those sort of debates would be unthinkable today because CPAC is pay-to-play. It's a grift," he added. "It's very clear that unless you pay a lot of money, you don't get to speak or you don't get any access at CPAC. And as a result, you get a bunch of random people, entities, companies, organizations that no one has ever heard of before sponsoring this event."

Indeed, a trip to the exhibit hall saw several tables from organizations such as Atheists for Liberty, the Benjamin Rush Institute, Hawaii Conservatives, and regional CPACs for Japan and Hungary. Missing from previous years were Fox Nation, the Heritage Foundation, and other previous sponsors.

Lennox pointed to the National Conservatism Conference, which first took place in 2019 and drew numerous high-profile speakers, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and DeSantis in 2022, as an example of a competitor conference that has filled the space that CPAC once dominated.

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"NatCon, which I've attended three times, is essentially what CPAC used to be in the sense that it's got panels, it's got speakers, there's debate and discussion, and, in some cases, quite a diverse range of opinions represented," Lennox said. "And at CPAC, you certainly don't see that [anymore]."

CPAC did not respond to repeated requests for comment and a report on the number of paid attendees for the 2023 conference.