For those assessing a  Rick Perry presidential candidacy in the wake of his announcement of announcement plans, here are some highlights of attitudes in Texas toward Perry and the 2016 GOP presidential nomination context.

Perry's favorability ratings in February 2015, shortly after the end of this 14-year tenure as governor, seemed comparatively tepid:  

The number of respondents who didn't express an opinion about the governor was a little striking.  This was after the inauguration of the new governor and long 2014 campaign (including a sometimes bruising GOP primary season), and Perry was not a candidate and didn't play a large public role.  But the drop from a comparatively strong showing in the October 2014 poll was noticeable, as was the implication once out of the spotlight, Perry wasn't taking up much cognitive real estate among Texans.

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In the context of the 2016 GOP presidential contest, Perry has run consistently behind Ted Cruz in every poll we've done of that race. The actual election was a year or more in the future in all of these poll results; but they still illustrate that Cruz has so far supplanted Perry as a potential national candidate among Texas GOP voters.  Below are some results from February 2015 and October 2014.

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There are many more poll results related to Rick Perry from the last five years, including job approval numbers and numbers from the 2010 election contest, in our data archive.  GOP 2016 results go back as far as trial heats in 2013 -- at that point, mostly a way of assessing the relative strengths of Perry and Cruz during Cruz's blazing entrance into the Texas public eye.  In October 2013, after being blamed for a federal government shutdown, Cruz nonetheless led Perry 32-10.