you re living in the cnn newsroom. i m jim acosta in washington. right now less than ten miles from the u.s. capitol former president donald trump is firing up his maga base at the conservative political action conference. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the next president of the united states. president donald j. trump. [ cheers ] i m proud to be an american where at least i know i m free that was the intro for the former president just moments ago. trump receiving a warm welcome at the annual c-pac gathering where his following has turned dominant, and the man who tried to overturn the 2020 election results appears to be the party s front-runner for 2024, according to recent polls. manip minutes ago there was a straw poll, take this with a grain of salt, he trumped the biggest rival, florida governor ron desantis, 62% to 20%. we have more now from the c-pac gathering. i guess this was not a big surprise that trump won the c-pac poll and not much surprise what
it just came up. 20 seconds later, it was gone. tornadoes and golf-ball sized hail pummelled the southern u.s. there s another rournd of severe weather on the way. plus to conviction, the prison sentence for alex murdaugh and what he had to say during his sentencing. and a man accused of plotting to murder, we ll look at the rise in semitism across the u.s. we start this hour with the extreme weather hitting huge parts of the country. at least ten people have died as the powerful storm system marches across the south and into the northeast. the next western storm will be you shalling inland saturday bringing another round of snow to the pacific northwest, northern and central california. in some places, new snow will be measured in feet. the system that brought tornadoes, damaging winds and flooding to the season central and eastern u.s. will be offshore by later this morning, but the cold part of the storm is going strong. winter weather alerts are in places across p
maine, new hampshire and massachusetts. we re finally starting to see things subside at this point. a lot of these areas have picked up a foot or more of snow. it s the snow combined with the wind, making travel very difficult. this wind could trigger more trees coming down and an increase of power outages and we already have plenty of those across that region. now we move from the east coast to the west coast where our next system is beginning to take shape. we re starting to see rain and snow showers across areas of washington state, oregon and northern california. that s going to not only spread south into central california, but also inland. a lot of those intermountain west states are also going to pick up considerable amounts of snow, maybe not necessarily today, but certainly over the next 48 hours. that s why you ve got the weather advisories for several states. it s going to be waves of rain and snow coming in for these areas. the highest amounts are really going to