More evidence that a large share of "moderates" are non-ideologues
A reader replicated my analysis of political ideology using alternative data
In Nov. 2025, I published an analysis arguing that most Americans don’t think about politics in particularly ideological ways. After surveying over 2,000 people and asking them to describe their ideal political party, I found that the largest group of Americans — nearly 40% — wanted the parties to focus on national conditions and general well-being, and did not use ideological language to describe their ideal party.
I found that:
The most common thing for people to be in America is ideologically disengaged. Then you’re a misfit, then a liberal or conservative, then a true moderate — about 4% of voters.
A reader named Steve decided to test this with completely different data. He wrote to me:
A few weeks ago I responded on the SIN Discord to your post about “most voters think about affordability, not ideology”. I included a spreadsheet with cleaned open-ended answers to the “what do you like/dislike about this Party?” variables from the 2024 ANES surveys ... hinting that someone might want to try a similar exercise on this different dataset. Nobody bit (as far as I know), so I recently fired up Google Gemini Pro to see if it could generate the four variables you derived from your bespoke Nov 2025 survey.
And Steve’s bottom line is:
Even with all the differences between the datasets, the questions themselves, the different contexts, and the different LLMs, I think the results tend to support the main contention in your post, that most Americans are not ideological in how they think about politics.
Thanks to Steve for sharing his data and allowing me to write about it. Let’s dig into what he found.
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