How Gen X Delivered the Election to Donald Trump

Generation X is starting to flex its cultural and political muscle, data show.

Two and half years ago, Politico published a story featuring Cherielynn Westrich, a founding member of the power pop band The Rentals who went on to become a lawmaker in Iowa.

Westrich, who was first elected to the 81st District of the Iowa House of Representatives in 2021 before joining the senate to represent the 13th district, is described as “a Zelig-like figure in ‘90s pop culture,” a reference to the 1983 Woody Allen movie that shows Leonard Zelig (Allen) popping up in historic scenes with all sorts of famous people from the 1920s.

As journalist Ben Jacobs explains in the article, Westrich played with Spike Jonze, toured with Alanis Morissette, and worked for Flea (yes, that Flea); and she’s not shy about talking her rock n roll past.

“Well so, you guys know who Madonna is?” she asked a group of children at the Iowa state capitol. “Madonna signed my band to her record label, and we toured all around the world and got to play all the big coliseums like Madison Square Garden, and then we had videos — you guys know about MTV? — we had two of them, and you can still find them online from a long time ago back in the 1900s.”

Jacobs used Westrich, who is a Republican, as a vehicle to drive home the thesis of his article: that Gen X—those born 1965-1980 (or so) who came of age during the Cold War, Ronald Reagan, and the age of MTV and hairbands—had become the “Trumpiest Generation.”

The popular image of Generation X has never quite fit in within any easy political framing. It’s the generation that produced grunge rock and gangsta rap but also reached cultural consciousness at the height of the “greed is good” 1980s memorialized in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. In fact, if there was any popular image of this generation’s politics, it was that they were apolitical. The slackers depicted in Richard Linklater movies or the grunge rockers in flannel were almost devoid of political inclination save a generalized cynicism and MTV’s “Choose or Lose” campaign, which was designed to simply convince young voters that politics matters at all. After their first election in 1984, they bounced back and forth in presidential elections — although exit poll data doesn’t always provide a clear generation breakdown — but were never at all particularly progressive and veered to the right of the nation as a whole.

And there were always hints of a more right-wing inclination culturally even if they may have been camouflaged by the less politically charged atmosphere at the time. The first major political depiction of this cohort was on the sitcom Family Ties, where Reagan-loving teenager Alex P. Keaton clashed with his liberal boomer parents. As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini put it to Politico, “the MTV generation has always been a little bit more conservative.”

Now, though, there is no confusion: Generation X is safely Republican.

One model from 2014 measuring only white voters through the 2012 election shows those born in the mid-to-late 1960s being the most Republican-leaning of all, more so than the older Boomers and Silent generation. In a poll released in late April by Marist/NPR that separated voters by generation, Generation X had the highest level of disapproval for Biden and were the generation most likely to say they would vote for a Republican candidate in the midterms if they were held that day.

Jacob’s thesis is clear: Gen X is the most Republican generation, and it was the one most opposed to the Biden administration.

Not everyone agreed.

Phillip Bump pushed back on the thesis in a Washington Post article the following year. Bump conceded that Jacobs and others, like Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin, had offered evidence that “Gen X is Trumpier than other cohorts.” The problem, he wrote, is that “it isn’t.”

“Compared with Gen Z, Gen X is pro-Trump,” wrote Bump, who offered various data sets to support his claim. “Compared with those in the silent generation and older, it has not proved to be. Stuck in the middle, once again.”

So who’s right: Bump or Jacobs?

Well, as it happens, we just had a presidential election. And following elections, we always have tons of data on how Americans voted. A great deal of the data looks at how votes breakdown along lines of race and gender, and that’s what journalists tend to focus on the most. However, we also have lots of data on how voting broke down along generational lines. And exit polls across the board, conducted by various news organizations like the Associated Press, tell a similar story: Gen X supported Trump more than any other generation.

Data show that Gen X voted for Trump over Harris by a +8 margin, while other generations went to Harris.

David Zweig, a longtime writer for New York magazine and The Atlantic, asked on Twitter for “hot takes on why Gen X decided the election.”

There were several good responses.

“Lower consumption of legacy media couped with non-consumption of university race/sex/gender courses,” wrote Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers.

“We lived through the 70's desolation and the 90's crime wave,” responded economist Peter St. Onge. “Like Eastern Europeans who lived through Communism.”

My personal favorite came from “pickup truck enthusiast” John Ekdahl.

“Because we grew up drinking water from a garden hose,” he wrote, “and then you made us wear masks outdoors.”

As a member of Gen X, I can say I’ve always been proud of my generation. (It feels weird for me to say this, I confess, because I’m an individualist and I think a great many of the cross-generational comparisons we see on the media are nonsense.)

Yet the pride I’ve felt has never had anything to do with politics. I like my generation because we’re more no-nonsense than other generatoins. We played outside all day without adult supervision and rode bikes without helmets. We’re anti-snowflake. We believe in morals but we shun moral preening. We have little tolerance for the speech police, laugh at off-color jokes (even when we’re not supposed to), and are almost impossible to offend (unless you say “that’s offensive.”)

Am I generalizing? Of course. People are individuals, and not everyone in Gen X embodies these traits. But Gen X, as a whole, does—and it might help explain why Gen X put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office.

Trump’s vulgarity and coarse language, which offends so many Baby Boomers and Millennials, is less likely to bother people in my generation. Hell, for some, it’s what they love about him. He’s the Happy Gilmore of politics, the boisterous upstart the fans love but the elites despise.

For the record, Gen X’s character traits never seemed “political” to me. But I suppose they are, which is a shame. To me these are just good values, and deeply American ones. And this is one reason I’m happy to see Gen X beginning to assert itself.

In his book Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials (2018), author Matthew Hennessy made the case that it’s time for Gen X to step up as a cultural and political force.

“If we don’t act fast, the Millennial wave is going to sweep Gen X overboard,” wrote Hennessy, an associate editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal.

Trump, of course, is not in Gen X; he’s a Baby Boomer. And whether his election win on Tuesday turns out to be a good thing or a bad things is something only time will tell.

That said, one thing is clear: Gen X is starting to flex its cultural and political muscle, and like Hennessy, I think that’s a good thing.