Which btw isn't to say that all members of Gen X and Gen Y are doing damage to the Republic.
The fact that Obama got a lot of votes from those 45 and above is meaningless here because he got a minority of those votes.
Your argument is specious and meaningless. 45 and above for McCain, 44 and below for Obama. Which part of that don't you understand Joe?
Votes don’t care about ages, only the total matters. That the majority of the votes Obama recieved were from Boomers states that even though he got a lower share, they were the crucial difference in the election.
Second, because we do not popularly elect a president, but do so through an electoral college system, your graph is meaningless without a geographic distribution of the age demographics. Some areas of the country are "younger" and may have gone for Obama anyways regardless of the youth vote, in a sense making extreme percentages of those younger votes irrelevant when Obama had a lock there anyways. Your graph doesn't allow for that, and so it's simply not useful for supporting your contention that the younger voters were any more responsible for Obama than older voters.
Having said that, another way to view my prior refutations would be through hyperbole. There were more voters (53%)in the 45 and above demographic...let's call them the "older voters" or OV, and fewer (47%) in the 44 and below that we'll call the "younger voters" or "YV".
Now hypothetically, say that out of a total of 100 voters, there were 92 OV and only 8 YV. If 44 OV voters went Obama and 48 went McCAin and all YV went Obama, Obama still wins 48 - 52. Yes, you can report that "100%" of YV went to Obama, but that still doesn't change the fact that the bulk of Obama's votes came from the OV. Now obviously that's a highly exagerrated illustration, but it seems I need to do that to illustrate my point.
Again, when you weigh the hard percentages(using your data) the single largest demographic segment was the 45 - 64 at 37% of the vote, or 8% greater than the next largest segment of 30-44 year-old voters. That block (45-64) split evenly 49/49, so out of every 100 person sample, that represents 18 Obama voters (49% of 37%). Although 52% of the 30-44 block went Obama, that represents only 15 Obama(52% of 29%) voters in a 100 voter sample, so even though the percentage may have been higher (52 to 49), the number of votes cast was less. When you roll in the two smaller blocks the oldest add another 7 for Obama, and the very youngest add in another 12. That makes the overall split of Obama votes 27% YV and 25% OV, which is not that huge a skew, and while you don't cite the source of your data, I'm guessing it's very well within the margin of error for that poll, ergo my earlier contention that the split between younger and older voters, in terms of raw numbers of votes were roughly 50/50.
My point is, you suggest that the YV went wildy in favor of Obama. My point is, when all the numbers were rolled in together and compared, not so much. The Boomers may have been marginally more so for McCain percentage-wise, but the fact is they turned out his raw numbers. I would further add that much of the youth vote was lost when the GOP selected McCain as their candidate.