Of the 850,000 or so registered voters, nearly 44% are Independents, 30% registered Republicans and even smaller percentage (26%) are registered Democrats. And since these Indepenedent voters can vote for either a Republican or a Democratic candidate, they are indispensable for candidates from both parties.

The current surge in polls, both for Obama ( ~39% to Clinton’s ~29%) and McCain (~32% to Romney’s ~30%) -who won the primary vote in 2000 against Bush- can be attributed to a limited extent on their increased appeal in their respective parties and could help them to win tomorrow. However, the main reason for these extraordinary poll numbers, especially for Obama are mainly due to Independent voters. Ironically, the more independent voters go to Obama, the less likely it is for McCain to win tomorrow’s vote, which in turn could mean a win for Romney.

Below is a heatmap of spatial distribution of Independent voters across the Granite State from 2004. For an interactive version of the map where you could use pan and zoom functions to navigate the map and explore details of distribution of Democrats and Republican voters, go to Geocommons .

New Hampshire Independent Voters, originally uploaded by rajkulkarni63.

The original data for Year 2004 was compiled by Belgen on Many Eyes website which was then geocoded and rasterized using GeoCommons tools to generate the current heatmap.

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