The hidden axis: the left-right spectrum has a non-ideology problem

[...]most voters that appear as “moderate” on the normal two-dimensional, economic-social ideological plane are actually non-ideologues — they are being forced onto the ideological spectrum because of biased analytical techniques, but do not actually belong there if the question being answered is “What political party would this person vote for?”.

It is easy to see how this bias crops up when you consider how other survey analysis of voter ideology is conducted. When a researcher asks voters 20 questions about a mixture of economic and social policies, and force them to answer those questions in favor of liberal or conservative issue positions, they end up putting voters into an ideological box related to those issue positions. Most so-called “moderates” get placed in the middle of the Democrats and Republicans because they are forced to pick positions on issues they otherwise do not care about.

Our analysis allows moderates to escape this forced ideological categorization by adding an additional axis of “ideology” — that of non-ideology.

As mentioned, this is not a surprise; decades of political science research has found that most voters are not ideological Additionally, as the salience of affordability and inflation have risen in recent years, it is not a wonder why voters have prioritized issues that are not clearly on the left or the right of the political spectrum. This needs to be taken into account when creating our mental models of voters. Not everyone sits squarely somewhere on the ideological spectrum. Some voters exist off it entirely.