A really quick thread on @KamalaHarris's campaign & what it meant to Gen Xers. I know from my social networks that she has a particular resonance with us Gen Xers. First, she was the first definitive high-profile Democratic Gen X candidate. Her cultural touchstones were...1/

ours...Trump got punk'd, the Howard University yearbook photos, protesting apartheid, the pop culture references she dropped at events & on talk shows. She got us and we got her. & like our generation, she was too often overlooked in favor of those older & younger than us...2/

beyond this though, her departure from the race feels like a disorienting loss for what we thought politics was going to be. We're not an ideological generation, we're a practical generation focused on getting things done. That's her approach to policymaking too & it may have..3/

hurt her candidacy in comparison to the more ideological candidacies of Warren & Sanders to her left & Buttigieg & Biden to her right. A lot of media commentators said they didn't know what she stood for. That was bunk. Her policies are detailed & thoughtful. But they don't...4/

fit into neat ideological boxes b/c our politics often don't either. As @KamalaHarris often says "No good public policy ends with an exclamation point." Millennials' love for the more rigid, liberal ideological outlooks of Warren & Sanders is, frankly, something that...5/

many of us Gen Xers just don't get. This isn't how we think about policymaking, perhaps in part because we lived through the consequences of a similar outlook on the right during the Reagan era...6/

The rise of an ideological, predominantly white left in the Democratic Party is really disorienting for a lot of us Gen Xers. This isn't the party we grew up with and in which we came of age. For us, Obama was the exemplar of who a Democratic presidential candidate is...7/

a charismatic, biracial, aspirational, coalitional Democratic politician. So in the loss of the closest candidate in all these respects to Obama & the one most likely to recreate the Obama coalition, it feels like we're losing what we thought the Democratic Party would be...8/

in our adult years, especially in an election in which whiteness has become not just the defining characteristic of the field but something that Democratic primary voters are actively seeking. This isn't where we thought the Democratic Party would be in 2019 back when we...9/

were voting for Obama in 2008. So the loss of @KamalaHarris from the Democratic field feels like a personal loss for many Gen Xers both in seeing someone who represented us on that debate stage & also represented what we thought Democratic Party politics would be in our...10/

adulthoods. Many Gen Xers hope this election is an aberration, a response to the unusual times of the Trump era. And we hope that the politics exemplified by @BarackObama & @KamalaHarris will again define the Democratic Party in the very near future. 11/11

cc: @douglasemhoff @mayaharris_ @tonywest: a thread I put together that attempts to capture what a lot of Gen Xers are feeling right now.