New Hampshire residents play an outsized role in presidential elections. Who are they? The stereotypical Granite State dweller is a flinty, independent-minded Yankee.

“Since the outset, Yankeedom has put great emphasis on perfecting earthly society through social engineering, individual self-denial for the common good, and the aggressive assimilation of outsiders,” Colin Woodard writes in his taxonomy of America’s regional cultures. “It has prized education, intellectual achievement, community (rather than individual) empowerment, and broad citizen participation in politics and government, the latter seen as the public’s shield against the machinations of grasping aristocrats, corporations, and other tyrannies.”

These voters have been counterbalanced in recent years by what Michael Barone calls “greater Vermont”:

Once the nation’s most Republican state, Vermont is now the second most Democratic. The flinty Yankee farmers of yore have died out, replaced in the 1970s and 1980s by a flood of alternative lifestyle newcomers of whom Brooklyn native Bernie Sanders is a typical example… New Hampshire’s Democratic primaries used to be dominated by Irish- and French Canadian-descended textile mill workers. Now the mills are high-tech office space and the state’s Democratic electorate has been increasingly Vermontized, with fewer (as some analysts call them) beer Democrats and more wine Democrats.

Today the state is about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. And it is known for the independent streak of its voters. About 40 percent decline to state a party affiliation.