GenX, Voting Trends, and the "Sandwich Generation"

A theory I have about demographic trends that was briefly chatted about over the last election cycle

"If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain."

- popularly attributed to Winston Churchill

A lot of what I do forces me to think about intergenerational issues given how my residents have multigenerational families. Most of my residents average around the mid 70s in age, and while in a lot of cases I’m interacting with husbands or wives as decisionmakers or ‘next of kin’ – I’m often also interacting with their children and grandchildren – the latter of which, these days, increasingly hail from Generation X.

I spend a lot of time thinking about demographics and trends because of this, and because I’ve always been a political junkie – I spend a lot of time thinking about how intergenerational issues affect politics. While I’m no expert in terms of analyzing polling trends – I do think I have some special perspective to comment on this.

I want to talk about so-called “Generation X” (a term apparently coined by the Canadian Author, Dennis Coupland).

My generation.

We’re an interesting bunch. According to Pew Research, we’re generally defined as the US generation born between 1965 and 1980.¹

For GenX – we’re often referred to as the “latchkey generation” – & unlike our Boomer parents, where the cultural expectations and economic circumstances more often than not kept one of the parents (usually the mother) at home as a “homemaker,” our generation was one of the first to have to broadly contend with parents that worked outside of the home.

We also came of age just after the US civil rights movement. For those of us born a little bit older, we watched the US lose the Vietnam War on television with our families. We lived through the “Cold War” with the Soviet Union - where we were told constantly that we were under threat of nuclear anhillation, and we also watched the fall of the Berlin Wall on our televisions. GenX grew up with an understanding that everything around us was always changing, there were always forces at play much bigger than we were.

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

We watched Republican Ronald Reagan cynically deride ‘big government’ and famously stated at a press conference in 1986: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

We watched Democrat Bill Clinton later intone on national television in the 1990s (I did as a teenager): “The era of big government is over.”

Yet. in both cases we watched both presidents preside over similarly monotonic & massive rises in the size and spending power of the US government – both domestically and militarily.

Perhaps because of all of this – we grew up skeptical of authority, but unlike Boomers, we tended to be used to simply keeping our heads down and simply doing what we needed to do to survive, rather than going out and trying to change things via cultural revolutions (like the Boomers did in the 60s). We understood that the word was ruled by forces much larger than us, and we also understood that they weren’t out there acting in our best interests much of the time. So we decided that the best thing to do was to keep our heads down and take care of ourselves.

We became latchkey kids into adulthood.

Often the description GenX gets are things like we’re “pragmatic,” we “stay out of the limelight,” and we’re skeptics and cynics.

And according to some polling data, GenX is second only to the Millenial generation in terms of being self-identified independents. However, something may have happened in the last three years…..

How Gen X Became the Trumpiest Generation - POLITICO

“Trumpiest”? Really?

Beyond the headline, the article does make a case that simply noting that GenX tends to be politically unaffiliated much of the time obscures some very interesting things going on under the hood.

GenX As the Conservative Swing “Protest Vote”

Both Millenials, and the younger ‘Generation Z,’ who tends to vote pretty much in lockstep with the elder millenials - tend to self-identify as independents, but the evidence seems to be stacking up that they tend to break for left-leaning politicians and political views, and in the case of the recent, 2022 elections, it was a deciding factor in all sorts of races.

According to a report by the Pew Research Center, Gen X is the only generation in which the share of self-identified conservatives exceeds the share of self-identified liberals. In 2019, 39% of Gen X adults identified as conservative, compared to 34% who identified as moderate and 24% who identified as liberal. By comparison, among Millennials and Gen Z, the share of self-identified liberals is higher than the share of self-identified conservatives.

Clay Travis @ClayTravis

Generation X hates Democrats and as a result is saving the country. My theory as to why: Gen X’ers value individual freedom, hate identity politics and despise cancel culture mobs. Your theories?

Clearly, there was some evidence that GenX, if they had showed up in droves, might have ended up swinging the recent midterms more significantly towards the GOP…. which ended up only eking out a small majority in the House of Representatives in November of 2022, and *losing* ground in the Senate.²

That being said - I think it’s clear - why is it that GenX seems to be more Republican-leaning?

GenX - The Sandwich Generation

Basically, this is my argument - GenX (which, according to most accepted definitions is between the ages of 43 and 58 currently), is the generation most likely to be caught in the ‘demographic sandwich’ - perfectly positioned to be both most likely to be caring for older parents, but also most likely to be simultaneously caring for children, often still in school. Pew Research center talks about this phenomenon here.

To my mind - this sets up an almost perfect reason for GenX to be - and stay - angry, and be a powerful protest vote in the coming 2024 general election, where there will me more Democratic candidates defending seats, and where frankly, the last bits of fear-stupor from coronaphobia will likely finally be gone.

What’s left? I can speak for myself a member of GenX - it’s anger.

• Anger watching our kids get months, in some cases years stolen from them in terms of learning loss, with only pathetic “zoom school” instead of actual learning and socialization

  

• Anger watching them be force-masked for months even after they return to school, despite them being at statistically zero risk for significant C19 complications of any kind.

  American Academy of Pediatrics @AmerAcadPeds

  If caregivers are wearing masks, does that harm kids’ language development? No. There is no evidence of this. And we know even visually impaired children develop speech and language at the same rate as their peers.

• Anger hearing the American Academy of Pediatrics nonsensically deny there was any harm to children in terms of masking

• Anger about our children being guilted into giving up in-person school & masking so that they can avoid “killing grandma” - and now our kids have rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation that is skyrocketing.

Speaking of grandma, we as GenX are also angry about our parents.

• In nursing homes and assisted living facilities, we were cut off from seeing them and only allowed dehumanizing, traumatizing, prison-like “window visits” for months.

  

• In assisted living facilities, forced to mask for months, and forced to be served by masked caregivers. In nursing homes across the United States, due to CDC “recommendations” - residents have not seen their caregivers faces for going on three years now.

• We’re angry because our kids and our parents have been made into political props, our kids have been told they’re “dirty disease spreaders” liable to “kill grandma” (our parents)

  

  ……and all our kids and parents desperately want is to be together again.

1. If you want a good primer as to how the other US generations are defined popularly – go to A Comprehensive List of Generation Names (thoughtco.com)

2. The 2022 midterms were a surprise since the so-called “red wave” never materialized. Lots of opinions as to why it never did, and I think many of them / all of them could be true. One - Dobbs (abortion), which brought out the single, GenZ white female vote. Two - the GOP was defending more Senate seats than the Dems were - of the Senate seats that were up for election in 2022, 20 were held by Republicans and 14 were held by Democrats. Three - due to lots of migration of Democrat voters from cities to more traditionally Republican strongholds (suburbs and countryside), the GOP vote was diluted and finally, Four - likely some level of cheating (yes, I’m not saying anything controversial - every side does it every election).