Fox News Host's Political Romance Novel Leaves Readers Hungry

Dana Perino, Fox News host and former George W. Bush press secretary, wants young liberal women to stop worrying so much about politics. Her solution? A bestselling romance novel about three New York women who relocate to Wisconsin to campaign for Democrats—and end up falling for Republican men instead.

The premise taps into a broader cultural fantasy that’s been gaining steam: the idea that if we could just get people with opposing politics into bed together, maybe we could solve everything at last. Late 19th-century America had novels about Northern and Southern lovers yearning for postwar unity. Today, we have Yellowstone, Purple Hearts, and now Perino’s Purple State, all peddling variations on the same dream. But while Perino is hardly the first to attempt a cross-partisan romance, she might be the first to bungle it quite so spectacularly.

The book centers on Dot, Harper, and Mary—three educated, liberal urbanites who move to Cedar Falls, Wisconsin, for work on a Democratic super PAC campaign. They meet Jake (a cop), Tommy (a bar owner), and Danny (a contractor)—all Republicans, all ruggedly appealing in the most predictable ways. The setup promises tension, compromise, and maybe some real reckoning about what brings people together across ideological chasms. Instead, readers get a fundamentally muddled story that can’t decide whether politics actually matter. When Perino withholds the outcome of the presidential election on election night itself—leaving readers in permanent darkness about whether Democrat Lucy Lopez won—she makes a bold bet on her abilities as a novelist. The bet doesn’t pay off. It’s impossible to get invested in these couples when you can’t keep them straight, and the reasons these women would upend their entire lives for Wisconsin Republicans remain persistently unclear.

Compare this to Cecilia Rabess’s 2023 debut, Everything’s Fine, which explored a Black woman’s relationship with a politically toxic Republican through the specific lens of financial security and generational wealth. Rabess created friction, complexity, and actual stakes. Perino’s men, by contrast, are one-dimensional: Tommy’s big thing is not believing in lactose intolerance, Danny has“large and rough”hands, and Jake wears a police uniform. There’s no gender conflict, no real ideological disagreement, no sex scenes—just a bookstore renovation that somehow becomes the book’s most compelling moment.

What emerges is a portrait of a certain type of 2026 confusion: the desire to imagine politics as something we wear lightly, something separate from who we are, something that shouldn’t get in the way of a good romance. It’s a seductive idea, especially if you’re exhausted by the partisan moment. But Perino’s execution suggests that politics, when you try to remove them entirely, leave a gaping void where substance used to be.