Why Did Generation-X Go So Hard for Trump?

Lloyd Dobler may have turned out differently than you might have thought.

One of the many dispiriting revelations of this past election was the discovery that the primary driver, statistically speaking, of Trump’s victory was not his voter turnout, or his increasing success with Latino and Asian voters, or some sort of suburban swing in his direction.

The reason Trump won this election was because Generation X, my generation, voted for him.

Generation X is generally thought of as the generation born between 1965 and 1980, so it’s not an exact match — the graphic above describes those between 1960 and 1979, and I have a difficult time seeing how someone who was well into their thirties when Nevermind and The Chronic came out can reasonably be considered “Gen-X” — but the basic gist of it holds: Gen-Xers, on the whole, voted for Trump. This flies in the face of what I have always thought about my generation, so I wonder if it’s worthwhile this morning to try to unpack exactly what this means.

First off, it’s obviously impossible to lock in a specific commonality among a group of…