Texas governor and soon-to-be presidential candidate Rick Perry was Al Gore’s Texas state chair in 1988. Gore shared the views of his fellow southern centrists — he opposed the federal funding of abortion, supported a moment of silence in schools for prayer, approved funding of the Nicaraguan contras and was against the ban on interstate handgun sales. It was a platform a conservative West Texas Democrat like state representative Perry could stand on, and he signed up to chair the Senator’s Texas campaign…
A decade later, Perry said the 1988 presidential primary election helped push him to his party switch. In the fall of 1988, he voted for Bush over his party’s nominee, Dukakis. “I came to my senses,” he told the Austin American-Statesman in 1998…
[In 2009] Perry was asked about their diverged paths at a Dallas builders’ meeting. “Did you get religion? Did he get religion? What has happened since then?” a member of the audience asked. “I certainly got religion,” Perry said, according to the Dallas Morning News. “I think he’s gone to hell.”
It was Karl Rove who convinced Perry to switch parties in 1989, and Perry has described himself and George W. Bush as “philosophical soulmates.”
