Rick Perry, GOP’s Most Viable Candidate for Latino Vote Drops Out of Race

Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry announced his withdrawal from the presidential race on Thursday.

By Jorge Rivas Jan 19, 2012

Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry announced his withdrawal from the presidential race on Thursday. "Rick Perry seemed the most promising new GOP candidate at the beginning of the summer—he ended a grant program that targeted communities of color, a move that could have given him a leg up among Latino voters looking for a conservative to vote for in the general election," Colorlines.com’s Shani O. Hilton said about Perry’s announcement. [In 2001, Perry signed the Texas DREAM act](https://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/rick_perry_immigration.html) — the country’s first law of that kind — which gave undocumented students who have completed at least three years of classes in a Texas high school before graduation, entrance to any Texas state school at in-state tuition rates "But between disavowing policies that supported Texas’s large immigrant population, pivoting on immigration policy, and his spectacular fizzle at debates, it was his race to lose. And lose he did," Hilton went on to say. Perry has endorsed former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.