Not to go into much detail, but a lot of my childhood was spent in poverty, with my family receiving some kind of gov. assistance. I was raised with the typical attitudes of the desperately poor: our situation is not our fault, it is the fault of the rich who keep stealing from us; the rich, of course, are evil, mean, conservatives who, if we stupidly elect them, will take away even the pittance we have; the liberal Democrats really care for us and understand how horrid the rich conservatives are, and they'll make sure we're taken care of, etc. I believed that if I put my faith in the government, my life would get better. Except that I didn't see the government actually providing anything except promises, and no one lives well on the dole. I desperately wanted out of poverty, and gradually, I came to realize that the liberal attitudes of the poor (which are different than the liberal attitudes of the rich) weren't going to get me there. Plus, I joined the Navy, which tends, by its nature, to be crawling with conservatives, and I gradually came to see that "those people" were not the evil brutes I had always been taught they were. Add to that my observations during the 80's, that liberals engage in a lot of fear-mongering (one example: Reagan was just waiting for the slightest excuse to set off WWIII) that ultimately proves false, every time, and I lost my faith in liberalism. Also, there is the liberal's single-minded devotion to "abortion rights," which really contradicted everything they claimed about being compassionate (by my thinking, the conservatives should have been pro-abortion, since they were, as I had been taught, evil and heartless). The last straw, for me, was when the Dems nominated Klintoon in 1992. Everything about him struck me wrong; I've had a very miserable experience with a man extremely like Klintoon, and I knew he would be very bad for the country. So I went and changed my voter registration to Republican, and here I am, today.
Since the journey to the right side was very long and involved a lot of self-reflection, no, no one came with me. I was always a skeptical, deeply thinking person; I have a feeling that without that trait, I'd still cling to the liberal "values" I was raised with.
Sorry for the long answer!