Former President Donald Trump’s strongest base of support in the general election, if you divide voters up by age, appears to be Generation X.
Trump leads President Joe Biden by 19 points among those ages 45 to 65, roughly Gen X, while the race is within the margin of error for boomers, millennials, and Generation Z.
The extraordinary generation gap has spurred endless speculation and recrimination among very online millennial pundits.
One simple explanation is that Gen X isn’t all that Trumpy but that it has very good real-world reasons to support the Republican Party over Biden’s Democratic Party.
Gen Xers got jobs, paid off student loans, got married in their 20s, and had children. This isn’t just a story. It’s the facts. The average age at first marriage in the early 2000s was about 25 for women and a bit higher for men — meaning the average Gen Xer was married with a job within a decade of leaving school.
The birth rate was higher in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when Gen X was the bulk of the baby-makers. Once the millennials entered their mid- to late 20s, the birthrate fell and kept plummeting. Births have fallen almost every year since 2007 and are now down more than 16%.
So the people who became grown-ups in a normal way are Republicans now. Trump expanded our child tax credit, and under him, the economy was really good, with nearly no inflation.
Millennials, to their discredit, have always cared more about national politics — they care more about other people’s business, families, and communities than they ought to and are less interested in forming families or being involved in their neighborhood than they ought to be.
“I guess Donald Trump as the end point of Gen X nihilism makes sense,” very online millennial liberal pundit Matt Yglesias concluded.
If you think life is about what happens on NPR and CNN and in Congress, then yes, folks who care mostly about their family and neighborhood look like nihilists.
Sure, Trump made politics crazy, but under him, the economy was more normal. If you wanted to mind your family and your job, the Trump era was better than the Biden era. The worst part of the Trump era was the nonsense forced on us by Biden’s party and defended by Biden to this day: the lockdowns and school closures.
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Biden’s party took over school boards, closed schools for a year, and abandoned regular curricula in exchange for preaching racial determinism and transgenderism.
So maybe it’s that simple: If you want a normal life of family, community, and work, you are more likely to be Republican, and the folks most likely to be parents are the most likely to desire normality.
