If you’re looking for the biggest Gen X-specific political memory, it may be this: the return of inflation as an issue.
One of the most striking findings in the exit polls was that my generation — Generation X — delivered the presidential election to Donald Trump.
Kamala Harris won voters under 30 and voters in their 30s — albeit by weaker margins than past Democrats did — and tied Trump with voters over 65. But voters age 45–64 gave Trump a ten-point margin, 54 percent to 44 percent, with Trump carrying forty-somethings 50 percent to 48 percent and 50- to 64-year-olds by a whopping 56 percent to 43 percent.
Gen X, covering those of us born between 1965 and 1979 (I was born at the heart of Gen X in 1971), are now between the ages of 45 and 59, so this overlaps fairly neatly with our generational cohort — although it also covers the late-Boomer cohort that includes Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, both born in 1964. Why?
Some of this is age as much as generation. Middle-aged adults are the people most engaged in responsible adulthood — working, paying taxes, raising kids, caring for elderly parents, leading community groups, and ascending to leadership positions in their jobs. We’re old enough to be looking ahead to retirement and recalling a world that has changed a lot in our lifetimes, but young enough that many of us still have kids who aren’t fully launched into careers and families of their own, and we’re still working.
It’s natural for our age group to tend more conservative. And it’s particularly natural for our age group to be alarmed by left-wing cultural insanity being pushed at our kids’ generation, which is what made the transgender issues in particular so potent.
But there are also some generational factors at work. One of those has come full circle: Back when Trump arrived on the scene and was slashing his way through Gen X primary opponents — in 2016, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal; in 2024, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Tim Scott — Gen X Republican voters were if anything the most skeptical toward Trump.
Young Republicans might have memories only of the party losing at the national level, or of the sour collapse of the late years of George W. Bush. Boomer Republicans remembered Richard Nixon and the party before it became as ideologically conservative. My generation, by contrast, grew up with Ronald Reagan. We had expectations about what a Republican leader should sound like, how such a leader should act, and what the party should stand for.
Trump, a Boomer seemingly transported straight from the Nixon years, clashed with all of that. Eight years later, with Trump a fixture, a lot of people have come around to accept the binary choice: It’s Trump or the Left — summoning up some of the ironic detachment for which our generation is best known. People voted accordingly.
Gen X also grew up with a particularly strong sense of individual responsibility and self-reliance, symbolized by latchkey kids. Those of us who went to college are of an age to have come out of school in a bad early-’90s economy and paid off our student loans, and are thus not especially sympathetic to the government treating student debt as a terrible hardship.
But if you’re looking for the biggest Gen X-specific political memory, it may be this: the return of inflation as an issue. The inflation of the Carter era, and its vanquishing in the early Reagan era, was for many of us our earliest political memory (along with the Iranian hostage crisis). It was a thing everybody’s parents complained about in the grocery store and on the gas lines. It seemed to have gone away forever as an issue. So, when a president a generation older than us presided over its return, it was only natural for Gen Xers to look at this and think, “You fool! How could you forget?”
Because we remembered, and we’ve had enough of that for one lifetime.