Dana Perino, the former George W. Bush White House press secretary and Fox News host, has stepped into fiction with a debut novel that takes aim at a question plenty of Americans are living with but few want to talk about openly: Can you love someone who votes the other way?
The book, "Purple State: A Novel," published this week by Harper, follows a young New York political PR professional named Dorothy "Dot" Clark who leaves the city for Wisconsin and falls for a truck-driving local. The premise is simple. The tension underneath it is not.
Perino, 53, told the Daily Mail that the idea had been rattling around in her head for years, since the early days of reality television, in fact. She imagined dropping her Wyoming ranch family into the middle of Manhattan and vice versa, then watching what happened.
"I had this idea bopping around in my brain, kind of when reality TV started, that wouldn't it be fun if I dropped my friends and family from Wyoming into the middle of Manhattan and vice versa, took my friends here and put them on the ranch and said: 'Good luck. I'll see you in three months.'"
The thought experiment became a novel. And the timing is no accident.
Polling after the 2024 election showed an increase in Americans saying they would never consider dating someone who voted the other way. Perino pointed to that trend as part of what drove her to write the book. She sees it as a kind of self-imposed isolation, people cutting themselves off from connection over ballot choices.
She met a couple in Florida who told her they had been in a "red-blue marriage" for 31 years. Their reaction to the idea that this was somehow remarkable? Perino said they essentially told her they didn't need anyone's help, they were doing fine.
"We don't need your help. We're good."
That kind of quiet confidence, people who figured out how to keep politics in its lane, runs through Perino's argument. She isn't pretending the divide doesn't exist. She's saying it doesn't have to swallow everything else.
The cultural moment she's writing into is real. Families fractured over the Trump years. Friendships ended over yard signs. Dating apps added political filters. The bedroom became a battleground, and Perino wants to ask whether it had to be.
Perino's own biography gives the novel its backbone. Born in Wyoming, raised in Colorado, her family still ranches in Newcastle, Wyoming. She has lived in Washington, Manhattan, and the UK. She accompanied President George W. Bush to Iraq in 2007 as his press secretary. The woman knows something about bridging different worlds.
Her marriage to Peter McMahon is the personal proof of concept. McMahon is British, 18 years her senior, and was living in England when they met. They sat next to each other on a plane. This August, they will have been together 29 years.
"There's 100 reasons why we shouldn't have been together."
Before that flight, Perino said she had gone through what she called a "terrible quarter life crisis" in her mid-twenties and hadn't dated anyone in two years. An older woman at a church singles group told her to relax. "God says: 'Fear not. I've got you. Relax.' You're 25. Everything's going to be fine." A few months later, she met McMahon.
The point Perino draws from that story is direct: she chose to be open to love even when it didn't look like what she expected. And her career didn't suffer for it. "When I chose to be loved, my career did not suffer," she said.
That message, that personal fulfillment and professional ambition don't have to be enemies, is the kind of thing conservative women have been saying for years, often to deaf ears in media and academia. It's worth noting that on-air commentators across the political spectrum increasingly find themselves drawn into debates about personal values and public identity.
Perino cited the famous bipartisan marriage of James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, and Mary Matalin, the veteran Republican strategist, as a real-world template for what her novel explores. Carville worked for Bill Clinton. Matalin worked for George H.W. Bush. They married anyway.
"He worked for Bill Clinton, she for George HW Bush, and they fell madly in love and really were able to go out on the speaking circuit and show people you could have debates with your loved one and go home and still be deeply in love."
Perino called that kind of relationship "aspirational." Not because it's easy, but because it proves something: political disagreement doesn't have to be a disqualifier for human connection. Carville himself has never been shy about sharp political commentary, yet his marriage endured decades of it.
The contrast with today's climate is stark. Perino described Washington as a place where everything felt "so transactional." She said she became disillusioned with politics during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, in part because "none of the women's groups stood up for her." That disillusionment didn't drive Perino out of public life. It shaped how she moved through it.
The most revealing line Perino offered may be the simplest one.
"Politics is interesting to me. Obviously, I love what I do but politics is not who I am."
For someone who briefed the White House press corps, who sits in front of a Fox News camera regularly, and who has built a career in the political arena, that's a striking distinction. It's also one that a growing number of Americans seem unable or unwilling to make.
Perino said she doesn't talk politics at the dog park in Central Park. She found that when politics wasn't the entry point, "nobody cared what my politics was." She described how people at events would ask her about policy, campaigns, elections, and then, almost every time, close with one final question.
"Then, at the end of the conversation, almost every single time they'll say: 'Can I ask you one more question?' And it'll be about how they could possibly find love."
That pattern, politics as the surface conversation, loneliness as the real one, is what "Purple State" tries to address. Perino isn't writing a policy brief. She's writing about the human cost of letting ideology consume identity.
The Washington Examiner noted that Perino's nonfiction books have been New York Times bestsellers, and that her move into fiction reflects a willingness to push herself into new territory, bringing her expertise in politics and American culture to bear on a story about romance in a swing state.
Perino framed the book's message carefully. She didn't claim it would "fix" anything. She said the novel is meant as something lighter than a prescription.
"Hopefully, in this book is a gentle lesson of: Wear your politics lightly and you'll enjoy your life."
She added that making politics the center of your identity "closes you off to friendships and opportunities." That observation cuts in every direction, but it lands hardest on a political culture, concentrated in media, academia, and coastal institutions, that has spent the better part of a decade insisting that the personal is political, that silence is violence, and that dating across party lines is a moral failing.
The left built that framework. Perino's novel is, in its own quiet way, a rejection of it. It's worth remembering that even some Democrats have begun to acknowledge that their party's fixation on political identity has become a liability.
Moving 225 miles up I-95 from Washington to Manhattan, Perino said, changed her understanding of how politics could be done, and how life could be lived outside the capital's bubble. Living among people who didn't share her professional world forced her to see that most Americans don't organize their lives around who holds the Senate.
That's a lesson Washington could stand to hear. And it's one that conservative readers, the kind who build families, run businesses, attend church, and treat their neighbors decently regardless of a bumper sticker, already know by instinct.
The book doesn't pretend that political differences are trivial. It asks whether they have to be fatal. In a country where public figures on the right continue to reach across conventional lines, that's a question worth taking seriously.
When the loudest voices in American life insist you must hate the people who vote differently, choosing love is the real act of defiance.
